Natalia Rodríguez Núñez-Milara

Natalia Rodríguez Núñez-Milara (Madrid, 1990) is a Spanish telecommunications engineer and entrepreneur specialising in artificial intelligence (AI). She is the founder and executive director of Saturno Labs, a technological innovation laboratory focused on developing solutions with social impact. In 2023, she was awarded the National Innovation Prize in the “Young Innovative Talent” category, becoming the first woman to receive this distinction.

Biography Rodríguez graduated with a degree in telecommunications engineering from the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering at the Technical University of Madrid (ETSIT-UPM), where she became interested in technology as a result of personal experiences related to connectivity and her curiosity to understand how devices and networks work.

She combined her university studies with a career as a basketball player, becoming a member of the Spain women's national basketball team. However, she gave up professional sport to focus on engineering and research, participating in projects on smart cities.

In 2019, she founded Saturno Labs, a company that applies emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, to the development of products aimed at social well-being in fields such as medicine, psychology, and social services. The company has created more than 20 technological solutions, including tools for monitoring hospitalised patients, mobile applications, educational platforms, chatbots, and machine learning-based systems for data analysis. Saturno Labs was the first Spanish company selected to participate in Amazon's Alexa Prize, an international competition in conversational artificial intelligence.

Rodríguez is also a university professor and vice-president of the Unoentrecienmil Foundation, dedicated to research into childhood leukaemia.

Awards In 2021, Natalia Rodríguez Núñez-Milara was included by Forbes magazine in its list of The 21 Protagonists of Change, a selection of people who stand out for driving significant transformations in different sectors.

In 2023, the Ministry of Science and Innovation awarded her the National Innovation Prize in the “Young Innovative Talent” category, which recognises multidisciplinarity and creativity in the development of entrepreneurial projects and innovative business growth, making her the first woman to receive this distinction.

Also in 2024, she received the 2024 Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Award from the Spanish Association of Telecommunications Engineers (AEIT-Madrid) for her contribution to bringing telecommunications engineering closer to society.