The Mayor of Barcelona submitted Esther Koplowitz with the highest honor of the capital of Catalonia

Xavier Trias, Mayor of Barcelona, has presented Esther Koplowitz with the city's Gold Medal of Scientific Merit for her outstanding charitable work at the helm of the Esther Koplowitz Foundation, which focuses primarily on social initiatives to help the most disadvantaged groups and promotes science, especially biomedical research in Barcelona.

Esther Koplowitz collected the award, Barcelona's highest distinction, before an audience which included members of her family as well as Dr Vicente Arroyo, director of the Esther Koplowitz Centre for Biomedical Research (CEK).

In Barcelona, her foundation built the La Nostra Casa retirement home in Fort-Pienc for disadvantaged elderly people, and the Esther Koplowitz Centre, one of the largest private sector institutions dedicated to biomedical research, which is forging a reputation in its field in Europe. More than 400 researchers from all over the world work at the centre, in close cooperation with prestigious scientists who study metabolism, diabetes, obesity, diseases of the digestive tract and liver, haematology and oncology, immunology, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular illnesses, Alzheimer's, and poverty-related diseases.

Esther Koplowitz's philanthropic work includes the construction and outfitting of another retirement home in Collado Villalba (Madrid), and a centre in Valencia for people with physical and mental disabilities. She also donated a Da Vinci robot to the Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid for use as part of the robotic surgery programme. Ms Koplowitz has also assisted a tactile vision project at Madrid's Complutense University, helped fund other disease research programmes, granted a large number of scholarships to students without means, and built, outfitted and donated a centre for grant recipients, benefiting approximately 240 students each academic year.