About The Speaker
When And where
Sonia Contera
Sonia Contera is Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Oxford. Her work brings together physics, biology, and nanotechnology to explore how life works at its most fundamental level.
She studied physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and continued her studies across several countries before completing her PhD in Osaka, Japan, on the physics of nanostructures, which led her into biology.
This international path shaped the way she moves across disciplines in her research today.
Her research looks at how matter interacts with its environment to store information and give rise to living systems that can adapt, learn, and evolve.
A central theme of her work is understanding biological growth and shape, which she studies in systems such as plants, neural networks, and tumours.
One of her most recent projects applies principles from biological physics and artificial intelligence to the design of zero-emission buildings.
Alongside her scientific work, Sonia Contera is an active public speaker and writer. She is a columnist for El País. In her writing, she explores the role of science in society and reflects on some of the major questions at the frontiers of knowledge.
She is the author of Six Problems That Science Cannot Solve (2025), where she examines some of the deepest challenges that science still faces today, and Nano comes to life: How nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology (2019),