Dr Nerea Alonso graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Salamanca, Spain in 2003 and then she received her PhD in Cancer Biology and Clinical Studies at the same University. Her PhD research focused on the molecular analysis of patients with Gorlin syndrome, a rare disease involving developmental alterations and basal cell carcinomas. In 2008 she moved to Edinburgh, UK, joining the Rheumatology and Bone Disease Unit as a postdoctoral research fellow. She has been working on the characterisation of a model for Paget’s disease of bone and she has been active part of an international consortium to study osteoporosis (GEFOS), leading a collaborative effort to identify genetic variants predisposing to clinical vertebral fractures in postmenopausal females. Dr Alonso is also interested in pharmacogenomics applied to the treatment of osteoporosis, and she has recently been awarded with a grant from the Scottish Chief Scientist Office to perform genetic profiling to predict the response to treatment in patients with severe osteoporosis.

Dr Alonso is a member of the European Calcified Tissue Society (ECTS), the European Human Genetics Society and the British Bone Research Society. She was awarded the ECTS New Investigator Award in 2013, as well as other prizes at international conferences. More recently, she was elected as a member of the ECTS Academy, which represents the most talented postdoc researchers in the musculoskeletal field in Europe.

I studied Environmental Sciences at the University of Almería.Then I obtained my PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Cancer Research Center (University of Salamanca / CSIC), under the supervision of Dr Isidro Sánchez García and Dr César Cobaleda Hernández. My predoctoral research focused on the study of hematopoietic development (T and B lymphocytes) and the search for transcription factors whose alteration triggered blast crisis in the progression of chronic myeloid leukaemia. After a stopover at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (NY) in 2014, I moved in 2015 to London as a Postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow (WHRI-Academy program) at the Queen Mary University of London under the supervision of Dr Carles Gaston-Massuet. My current research focuses on pituitary stem cells in order to understand the genetic mechanisms necessary for the pituitary development and how the alteration of this process can lead to the development of childhood tumours such as adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma.

After graduating in Biology at the University of Granada, I did a PhD in Biomedicine at the CSIC Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine “López-Neyra”. During my PhD I studied the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s disease. In 2014 I joined Dr Miller’s lab at King’s College London, where I have been studying the role of endoplasmic reticulum-mitochondria signalling in neurodegeneration. I joined SRUK/CERU in 2015 and currently I participate in the society activities by helping Javier and Fernando in the Awards Committee.

• Research Fellow
• University of Sussex

Name: María Jimenez Sanchez
Job position: MRC Research Fellow, Group Leader
Workplace: King´s College London

Scientific background: Maria is a MRC research fellow at the Maurice Wohl Neuroscience Institute at King´s College London. She is interested in studying the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration. Her newly established research group will explore the role of glial cells in these diseases in order to elucidate novel therapeutic targets. Until June 2016, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, where she moved after obtaining her PhD from the University Complutense in 2008.