EARLY STAGE
RESEARCHERS
Background
I studied Biomedical Sciences (BSc) and Translational Medicine (MSc) at the University of Barcelona. During my undergraduate studies, I was able to spend a semester in Graz, Austria, as part of the Erasmus program. It was there that I did my first extended laboratory stay, allowing me to enter into the world of research and making me realize that I wanted to pursue a scientific career.
I have always been interested in the field of cancer and stem cell research. I was lucky to have the opportunity to do an internship in the Leukemia Stem Cell group, led by Dr. Ruth Muñoz Risueño and based at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute (IJC) (Badalona, Spain), where I did my master's thesis in the context of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Since then, I became deeply fascinated by the mechanisms underlying this disease, and, for this reason, I decided to apply for a position within the INTERCEPT-MDS network.
In October 2021 I joined the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Katharina Götze at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar - Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany), where I will be carrying out my PhD project.
Research
I did my bachelor's thesis in the context of lipid metabolism in the skin, focusing on the generation of an in vitro system that overexpressed specific enzymes involved in the pathophysiological processes of a disease known as ichthyosis.
Later, I changed my area of study and turned to cancer research, which had always been my main interest. Thus, as a master's student at the Risueño Laboratory (IJC), I was part of a project aimed at exploring new therapeutic strategies for AML. More specifically, we wanted to investigate the involvement of the neuropeptide receptor in the chemoresistance processes of this disease.
As a PhD student in the Götze Laboratory, I am involved in a project dedicated to studying myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a disease defined by a process of malignancy-associated clonal evolution. In our project, we focus on the progression from health to MDS to investigate whether the process of clonal expansion is driven or influenced by the bone marrow microenvironment, with the ultimate goal of identifying targets that will allow us to intercept this progression.