Iñigo Losada has been named on the annual Highly Cited Researcher 2024 list

Iñigo Losada, professor of Coastal Engineering at the Universidad de Cantabria and Research Director of the Environmental Hydraulics Institute of the University of Cantabria (IHCantabria), has joined the annual list of the world’s most cited researchers in 2024 (Highly Cited Researchers 2024).

Losada is the first professor and researcher of UC included in Clarivate’ s ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list, the world’s most prestigious ranking of the most cited researchers in the world.

For the rector of the UC, Ángel Pazos, this is “enormously important news”. On the one hand, said Pazos, “it recognizes the outstanding research career of a person like Professor Losada, who has already received many national and international awards, but also, he stresses, it gives the research carried out at the UC “a special level, since he is the first researcher in our community to obtain this distinction and that a university has in its staff researchers with this rating of Highly Cited Researchers is extraordinarily important when it comes to the valuation of the university”, in this case the University of Cantabria, in the various international rankings.

One of the examples of the impact of this Clarivate list is its inclusion as one of the indicators of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai Ranking.

As Losada explains, for him one of the “fundamental aspects of this recognition” is the fact that inclusion in this list “is based on an absolutely objective metric that compares all researchers in different disciplines around the world. From this point of view, Losada considers, “it implies that the work one does has an important impact within our community and that it will have an important impact on society; it is something that really makes me proud”.

On the other hand, for Losada it is also “relevant” the fact that within the thematic “I appear in the multidisciplinary”. This really means, clarifies the researcher, “that the valuable contributions I have made are in different disciplines and this is nothing more than a reflection of the research carried out at the Institute of Environmental Hydraulics, which has a clearly multidisciplinary philosophy, reflected in its research results”.

“I also believe that this is a source of pride, because it lays the foundations for solving the major problems that society has, which is what we try to do at IHCantabria,” he said.

A rigorous selection with global projection

An individual’s selection in the Highly Cited Researchers 2024 means that he or she has authored multiple publications that are considered in the list ofHighly Cited Papers, those in the top 1% in number of citations per field and year of publication, in the Web of Science Core Collection, during the last decade.

The evaluation and selection process is based on Web of Science citation index data, along with qualitative analysis by bibliometric experts and ISI data scientists from Clarivate. This year, ISI analysts recognized 6636 highly cited researchers in 2024 from more than 1200 institutions in 59 countries and regions. In this group, the names of 99 Spaniards stand out, including Iñigo Losada.

An award-winning track record at national and international level

Íñigo Losada is a national and international reference in the field of coastal engineering and sustainability. He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Cantabria and the University of Delaware (USA). He was founding director of IHCantabria, where he is currently director of Research and scientific director of the Cantabria Large Offshore Engineering Tank(CCOB). He is a full member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain and the European Academy of Sciences, and is a member of several national and international networks and organizations.

His research interests address a wide range of topics, including coastal processes, wave-structure interaction modeling, nature-based solutions, ocean energy, coastal hazards and climate change adaptation. He has received some of the most prestigious awards in his profession, such as the M. Selim Yalin Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association for Research in Environmental Hydraulics.

He also received the Rei Jaume I Prize for Environmental Protection in 2018, from the Rei Jaume I Awards Foundation; the Leonardo Torres Quevedo National Research Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation in 2022, and the “Lucas Mallada” National Environment Prize, which was awarded the same year by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO).

In September of this year he received the International Coastal Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a society that in 2017 awarded him the John G. Moffat-Frank E. Nichol Award in Port and Coastal Engineering; this was the first time this award was given to an engineer who carries out his professional activity outside the United States.

Check out the Clarivate list of highly cited researchers for 2024 at this link.