We are thrilled to share that Karina Gómez García, CTO of our project partner NIDO Constructech, has been nominated for the prestigious Most Disruptive Award at the upcoming Women in Tech® Europe Awards 2026, taking place on 20 November at the French Senate in Paris.
Organised by Women in Tech® Global—a leading international movement founded by Ayumi Moore Aoki to advance women’s leadership, technological innovation, and participation in STEM—the awards celebrate women driving transformative, high-impact innovation across Europe.
This nomination particularly recognises NIDO’s development of a disruptive technology that aims to transform building climate control by incorporating extremophilic bacteria originating from Chile’s Atacama Desert into bio-based hydrogel matrices. By combining the metabolic activity of these microorganisms with the thermal properties of hydrogels, NIDO is investigating a system capable of generating, absorbing, and managing heat through natural processes, with the potential to reduce reliance on conventional heating and climate-control technologies.
This innovation represents a significant step towards a new concept of natural, biologically driven climate control, combining biotechnology, materials science, and sustainable engineering to explore how buildings could regulate their temperature by harnessing biological processes.
Within the SALINA project, NIDO leads the development and validation of bio-based, circular construction solutions. Drawing on alginates extracted from European seaweed crops, NIDO is developing an automated spherification process to produce bio-based hydrogels, which are subsequently integrated into advanced building panels with thermal and acoustic properties.
The combination of marine-derived biopolymers, functional biomaterials, and biotechnology based on extremophilic microorganisms opens up new possibilities for developing construction materials that contribute to both energy efficiency and the decarbonisation of the built environment.
By exploring alternatives to conventional, carbon-intensive construction materials and developing systems that harness natural processes to manage thermal energy, NIDO demonstrates the potential of the circular bioeconomy to transform traditional industries.
The entire SALINA consortium congratulates the NIDO team and Karina Gómez García on this international recognition and wishes them every success at the awards ceremony in Paris!