People

I am interested in the potential of biotechnology to address critical sustainability challenges. I also believe that grasping its full potential requires using different frameworks and applying skills from diverse backgrounds to navigate the complexity and vast datasets inherent in such systems. That’s why I decided to join the Integrative Biology Lab at CNB. On a personal level, I’m interested in philosophy, traveling, and sports.

I am physicist with (real) interest in biology. I did my PhD in the Centre for Molecular Biology Severo Ochoa in Madrid (CSIC-UAM) under the supervision of Dr. Ugo Bastolla. After my PhD, I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher the Microbial Ecology laboratory of Imperial College London, led by Prof. Thomas Bell, to then move to the Theoretical Biology group at ETH-Zürich, headed by Prof. Sebastian Bonhoeffer. I was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2021-2022, and I moved back to Spain in 2023 to lead the Integrative Biology laboratory at the National Centre for Biotechnology. Among my hobbies, rugby has taken up the most of my time and health, followed by dancing night and morning, the mountains and changing diapers.

My motivation has always been learning while I can. That’s what drove me to study Physics, and then I wanted to learn how biology works in a physical way. That’s what led me to do my master’s in Biophysics. Currently, I’m interested in microbial ecology because it’s a field where I think I can apply the knowledge I acquired in my career, but who knows what tomorrow holds? On a personal level, I’m interested in a lot of things like playing video games, role-playing and tabletop games, as well as playing the violin, and learning other instruments, and so on.

After nursing at the University of Almería (UAL), I moved into biochemistry at the University of Murcia (UMU) and then conducted two master’s degrees: space sciences at the International Space University (ISU), with research at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) on bacteria as a triage tool for space missions; and bioinformatics at the University of La Rioja (UNIR), with work at IdiSBA on cystic fibrosis patient data. These contrasting angles — space and disease — drew me to microbial ecology and this lab, where I use bioinformatics and computational modeling to study what keeps microbial communities stable. Outside the lab, I love running, reading, and having fun with friends..