Nuria Boluda Botella is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Alicante. Since 1992, when she became an assistant lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering, she has held several teaching positions, being responsible for 17 subjects of different undergraduate (Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Biology, Marine Sciences and Geological Engineering), doctoral and Master’s degrees (Geological Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Sustainable Water Management and Technologies). She coordinated this last programme from 2016 to 2019 and the Master’s theses carried out as part of work placements or internships from 2009-10 to 2020-21. She served as head of internships and work placements (Chemical Engineering degree) for 10 years, having supervised the work of more than 160 students. She has held management positions at the Department of Chemical Engineering, including secretary (16/02/2004 to 30/09/2004) and director (01/10/2004 to 10/03/2005). She has taught a total of 32 courses, mostly in the fields of chemical engineering and environmental technology, with special emphasis on hydrochemistry and water quality and treatment. Besides coordinating and participating in teaching innovation projects, she has taken the Teaching Adaptation Course and other courses offered to lecturers by the UA Education Science Institute. She has 6 five-year teaching activity periods.

As a researcher, she has focused on two lines: 1) phase equilibria and 2) water quality and hydrogeochemistry. In the first line, she carried out research in the field of holographic interferometry to measure diffusion coefficients and on the determination of liquid-liquid-solid equilibria, fundamentally for the dehydration of ethanol with inorganic salts or long-chain alcohols. She later studied other equilibrium systems with different phases: liquid-vapour, liquid-liquid-vapour and solid-liquid-liquid-vapour. As for her second line of research, she has participated in projects on groundwater, surface water and seawater quality and in specific studies on contamination (surfactants such as LAS, emerging contaminants like parabens, metals, etc.), its treatment and impact (laboratory or natural field conditions). Her studies on transport in porous media and reactive processes (ion exchange, adsorption or biodegradation) have been essential for the development of reactive transport models and their application to studies on marine intrusion and other contamination processes. In relation to this line, she undertook research visits at the University of Costa Rica’s Department of Geology (San José, Costa Rica, two months in 1996) and the Laboratory of Chemical Engineering Sciences (Nancy, France, two months and a half in 1998). She has recently started studying the effect of electromagnetic treatment on water of different quality levels, as well as the modelling of calcium carbonate precipitation processes in assays. She has participated in numerous public and private research projects and supervised more than thirty Master’s theses in cooperation with companies specialising in integrated water cycle management, more than fifteen undergraduate theses (as part of undergraduate degrees and former second-cycle undergraduate degrees, in addition to projects under academic supervision) and six doctoral theses (four in progress). She has 5 six-year research activity periods.