Claudia Jesus-Rydin

The 2025 Champion(s) for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Award is awarded to Claudia Jesus-Rydin for playing an essential role in driving policy initiatives that reduce bias in equality, diversity and inclusion; creating fairer opportunities for funding and developing research careers.

Claudia Jesus-Rydin is a truly inspiring person in her working and personal life. She cares about people, she firmly believes in levelling the ground to provide fair treatment for all people, and she leads by example in her own daily life. Her solid sense of fairness is perceived in all her actions and transcends to colleagues and collaborators around her. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is the center of her actions to ensure fair treatment in the research environment.

As coordinator of the Gender and Diversity Activity Group at the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA), she led the implementation of policies established by the Scientific Council to promote equality in the evaluation process. Her knowledge that persistent, systematic and data-based work to promote EDI has had profound impacts when they are positioned high on the agenda in large organisations. This prompted her to work to implement mechanisms that led to real changes at ERCEA and beyond. These evidence-based policies and procedures created more fair opportunities for individuals to acquire research funding and to develop their research careers. Following these initiatives, there has been increased female proposal submissions and a more balanced success rate between genders, especially within early career stage funding programs.

She supported the ERC Scientific Council by leading initiatives to ensure equal treatment and diversity at other levels (e.g., cultural, geographical, ethnical, among others), reducing subjective assessment and raising awareness through training on Unconscious Bias to all actors in ERC evaluations. These actions have gone far beyond the ERC: they have been replicated and implemented in other funding bodies at national and international levels. Her work has been internationally recognised and her innovative ideas on how to promote and encourage diverse and inclusive participation at the EGU General Assembly set a model that has been reproduced in other major congresses. She has presented widely, authored many publications, coordinated a special volume on Diversity and Equality in Geosciences and has organised events on EDI for the scientific community.

Claudia Jesus-Rydin is a person that helped to change the history of diversity, equality and inclusivity in geosciences. The legacy of her EDI related activities are substantial, pioneering and introducing new EDI related practices to the European geosciences community.