Donat was born in 1960 in La Font de la Figuera.[1] After earning a degree in mathematal sciences from the University of Valencia in 1984, she traveled to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985 as a Fulbright Scholar, earning a master's degree there in 1987 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1990.[2] Her doctoral dissertation, Studies on Error Propagation Into Regions of Smoothness for Certain Nonlinear Approximations to Hyperbolic Equations, was supervised by Stanley Osher.[3]
She has held a tenured position at the University of Valencia since 1993, and was given a professorial chair there in 2008.[4]
She was elected as president of the Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics in 2016,[4] becoming the society's first woman president[5] and holding office from 2016 to 2020.[2]