M. Ángeles Serrano obtained her Ph.D. in Physics at the Universitat de Barcelona in 1999. One year later, she also received her Masters in Mathematics for Finance from the CRM-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. After four years in the private sector as IT consultant and mutual fund manager, she returned to academia in 2004. She completed her postdoctoral research at Indiana University (USA), the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) and IFISC Institute (Spain). She came back to Barcelona in 2009, when she was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship at UB. In February 2009, she obtained the Outstanding Referee award of the American Physical Society. She is a Founder Member of Complexitat, the Catalan Network for the study of Complex Systems, and a Promoter Member of UBICS, the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems. M. Ángeles Serrano is ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona from October 2015.

Research interests

Complex networks -e.g. the Internet, molecular networks in the cell, or the international trade system- are ubiquitous and around us. All of them, regardless of their origin, talk a common language that we are starting to understand. A major challenge for a better comprehension of the relation between their structure and function, and so for the prediction of their adaptation capabilities and evolution, is the characterization of the multilevel nature of complex networks in space and time. We are investigating the role of space, producing maps of networks embedded in a hidden geometry where distance stands as a measure of the tendency of elements to interact. Our focus is also on multiplexes and on networks of networks, in which different types of interactions coexist, and on the impacts of time variability in the presence of connections. Our applications cover a wide variety of real systems, from biological systems to economic and sociotechnological networks.