Profile

Personally, I grew up in Spain (Madrid), where I did my undergraduate studies in Biology and my PhD in Developmental Biology. Both my parents work in education and/or research, so it was natural for me to go into an academic career. I also did a mid-degree in music (guitar). Then I moved to the UK, going through Cambridge (where my first child was born), Cardiff (second child), and now Colchester, where I am a Lecturer at the University of Essex.

I am a developmental and stem cell biologist. These disciplines try to understand how a fertilised egg becomes an adult individual: larger, more complex in shape, and with different tissues that perform each a different bodily function. This means manipulating the genetics of embryos with great precision, and this is something easy and cheap to do (and more humane, I think) in flies, which are an amazing organism to work with if you are interested in genes, cells and tissues.

Every day I will have some form of meeting, lecture or practical session to attend, each at a different time. I prepare for each event, and use the rest of the time to make progress in my research – sometimes this means taking care of fly cultures, or writing papers, research proposals, perform experiments, look for instruments that I need for those experiments, etc. I like that every day is a different challenge, and every year I learn something new.