Xavier Bellés receives recognition for 50 years of service at CSIC
Xavier Bellés received the Recognition Badge for 50 years of service at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) this Tuesday. The event, a tribute to those who in 2023 marked 25 or 50 years of service to CSIC, was held at the Catalonia Delegation in Barcelona and included a welcome speech by Lluís Calvo, CSIC Delegate in Catalonia.
“A very emotional event. It feels like yesterday when I walked through the doors of the Research and Development Center in Barcelona to offer my help with research tasks. I was 18, and at 20, I secured a position as a Research Assistant. It wasn’t too difficult: there were three openings, and only two candidates. Then everything else followed, up to now, 53 years later. The good moments far outweigh the bad ones, which there were too,” says Bellés, Principal Investigator at IBE.
From left to right: Xavier Bellès, Principal Investigator at IBE, and Lluís Calvo, CSIC Delegate in Catalonia.
About Xavier Bellés
Xavier Bellés i Ros is a Catalan biologist specializing in entomology. Currently, he serves as an ad honorem research professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he has been conducting research for over fifty years.
Today, he leads the Insect Metamorphosis Evolution Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of CSIC and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which he co-founded in 2008 and where he served as the first director until 2017.
His work at IBE has focused on studying insect metamorphosis, resulting in 11 books and 382 scientific articles. He has also made significant contributions to the systematics of beetles, describing 32 genera and 89 species new to science, as well as to the history of science and the study of medieval literature, with contributions on the Bestiary. In this field, he has received the Scientific Literature Award from the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation and the Bronze Prisma from the House of Sciences in La Coruña.
He is currently a full member of the Institute for Catalan Studies and the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Madrid. He is also an honorary member of the Spanish Society for Evolutionary Biology and has received the Narcís Monturiol Medal for Scientific Merit from the Catalan Government. In 2024, he was named Honorary Member of the Italian National Academy of Entomology.