Speakers

Short bio: Javier Fernandez-Martinez is an Ikerbasque Research Associate and Group Leader at the Instituto Biofisika (CSIC/UPV/EHU) in Leioa (Spain) and Research Assistant Professor at The Rockefeller University in New York (USA). He graduated in Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Alicante (Spain) and obtained his Ph.D. in Science at the Complutense University in Madrid (Spain). During his thesis work at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas (CSIC), under the direction of Prof. Miguel Angel Peñalva and Dr. Eduardo Espeso, he got involved in the field of nuclear transport, and became particularly fascinated by the main mediator of this process, the nuclear pore complex (NPC). He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Michael P. Rout at The Rockefeller University in New York (USA) where he applied an integrative approach to solve the structure of the budding yeast NPC and its subcomplexes. His laboratory main interest is unraveling the functional and evolutionary implications of the NPC architectural diversity within cells and across eukaryotes.

Short bio: Nunilo completed her B.Sc. in Biochemistry at University of Zaragoza in 2002, and later her PhD at the same University (2007), under the supervision of Prof. Javier Sancho, focused on protein folding, stability and ligand binding. Then she joined the group of Prof. Christopher M. Dobson at the University of Cambridge (U.K.) (2008-2014) to investigate the mechanisms of protein misfolding and amyloid aggregation and its associated toxicity. During this time, she was awarded a long-term postdoctoral Human Frontiers Science Program fellowship and a career independent Dorothy-Hodgkin fellowship from the Royal Society (UK). In 2014 she became an independent researcher, first at the University of Cambridge (UK, 2014) and later at the University of Zaragoza (Spain, since Dec 2014) as a tenure-track “Ramón y Cajal” fellow first and now as Associate Professor at Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology. She leads the Protein Misfolding and Amyloid Aggregation Group at the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI). Her research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of protein phase separation and amyloid aggregation, processes involved in a number of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer´s and Parkinson´s disease, by means of a multidisciplinary approach. She has published more than 50 scientific publications since 2005, with more than 4,000 citations, an average of 86 citations/article and with 4 articles cited more than 300 times (h-index 32). She has been invited as a speaker in many national and international conferences, including the 2019 EBSA Congress and the presentation “Woman in Science” at the 45th SEBBM Congress, and was awarded the 2020-Pérez Payá-SBE40 Award. Since 2023, she is the BIFI Scientific Secretary and since 2022 one of the members of the Executive Council of the Biophysics Society of Spain (SBE).