ABOUT

I am a research fellow at the Nutrition Research Centre Ireland (NRCI), Waterford Institute of Technology. I obtained my Bachelor (Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of Navarra (Spain) in 1999, and I completed my PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Department of Genetics of the University of Seville (Spain) in 2006.

During my doctorate, I studied the genes of carotenogenesis in the fungus Fusarium, a work that I completed with a short-term EMBO grant that I obtained in 2005 to work at the University of Freiburg (Germany).

I performed my first postdoc at the Immunology Unit of the Hospital Universitario de la Princesa (Madrid, Spain). In this institution, I was awarded a Juan de la Cierva Fellowship in 2009 to investigate the effect of hypoxia on cardiac metabolism. For my second postdoc, I moved to the Institute of Biomedical Research Alberto Sols (Madrid, Spain) to work on cancer genetics.

After a career gap, I joined the Center for Desert Agriculture at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia). In this role, I studied the biosynthesis of carotenoid-derived plant hormones.

My current research interests at the NRCI include the development and commercialization of a macular carotenoid-enriched yoghurt and the mass production of zooplankton on land.