Mònica Escolà Casas

Mònica got her bachelor degree in Environmental Sciences on 2008 by Universitat de Barcelona. After that, she received an ARGO grant to do a stay at Eurofins Environment in France. During that stay she discovered the potential of analytical chemistry in the environmental field, so she enrolled a Master in Environmental Chemistry and Health at the University of Copenhagen. In 2012 she started her PhD in Environmental Chemistry at Aarhus University. In her PhD, Mònica studied the usage of different biofilm technologies to degrade pharmaceuticals. Once finished, she remained for about one more year in the same department collaborating in different projects, all related to removal or metabolization of organic micropollutants. After 8 years of Danish cold, Mònica decided to take a 9-month trip to South America, which was entirely dedicated to leisure and vitamin-D uptake. Once she returned to Denmark, she had the great opportunity to work for one year in MS-Omics, a start-up company providing metabolomic services. In there she was involved in very diverse dutties, ranging from sample preparation to customer meetings. In 2019, Mònica came back to Barcelona and applied for the Beatriu de Pinós grant together with IDAEA. In the mean time, she was hired for 6 months by ICRA (Catalan Institute for Water Research) to start implementing a sewage-epidemiology study in Barcelona in the frame of the SCOREWater project. Finally, Mònica was awarded the Beatriu de Pinós grant and started to work in IDAEA on February 2020. In IDAEA, Mònica is researching the plant-root and biofilm relations via metabolomics so that it will be possible to tune biofilms systems towards an enhanced organic micropollutants removal.