Mercè Garí is a Human Biologist and Tenured Scientist at CSIC. She holds a Degree in Human Biology (2005, UPF), a Diploma on Public Health (2007, UAB), a Master’s degree in Laboratory Analysis (2009, UPF) and a PhD in Biomedicine (2013, UPF).
She has focused her research career on the study of environmental pollutants and their effects on the human health, with 3 main sub-lines of research:
1) The innovative development and validation of new sampling techniques for the study of new pollutants or mixtures in human samples;
2) The evaluation of health outcomes in human populations associated to the pollutant’s exposures; and
3) The incorporation of computational tools, namely machine learning, on the Exposome research.
She has performed this work at top excellent international institutions in Spain and Germany, including the Universitat de Barcelona (2015-2016), the University Hospital LMU-Munich (2016-2018), the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich for Environmental Health (2018-2022) and IDAEA-CSIC (2005-2015; and again since 2022).
Mercè Garí has received several research awards and distinctions, including the Extraordinary PhD Award for her thesis “Patterns of accumulation of persistent organic pollutants in human populations” (UPF, 2013), the Environmental Science Award of the Catalan College of Environmentalists for the publication “Impacts of atmospheric chlor-alkali factory emissions in surrounding populations” (COAMB, 2014); the Seal of Excellence (European Commission, 2018 & 2021) and the Critics Award for Research (Sciences) for the book “Natura, ús o abús (2018-2019) Llibre Blanc de la Gestió de la Natura” (Serra d’Or Journal, 2021). She is an ‘Add-on Fellow for Interdisciplinary Science’ of the Joachim Herz Foundation since 2019.
