Biography

I have authored over 100 publications in the field of neurobiology, with contributions to the fields of neurotrophism and neural stem cell biology. My postdoctoral studies in the team of Dr. Louis F. Reichardt at the University of California San Francisco, with Fulbright and HFSPO fellowships and, later, as a UCSF researcher (1993-1998) contributed to the establishment of a true map of essential trophic dependencies and were also critical for determining some of the functional relationships between neurotrophic factors and their receptors in living organisms, such as the promiscuity of neurotrophin-3 or the identification of the orphan c-ret as a GDNF receptor (Nature 369:658-661, 1994, Cell 76:989-999, 1994; Neuron 16:515-527, 1996; Genes & Development 10:1382-1394, 1996; Nature 382:76-79, 1996; Neuron 17:1065-1078, 1996; Trends in Neuroscience 20:169-175, 1997; Neuron 21:53-67, 1998; Neuron 21:325-334, 1998; Journal of Neuroscience 21:6170-6181, 2001). My lab currently focusses on the mechanisms that regulate the behavior of neural stem cells with a particular interest in stem cell-niche interactions in normal and diseased brains. My group identified the first "angiocrine" factor, derived from vascular endothelium, the so-called PEDF (Fiscam and Alberto Sols awards in 2006) and has contributed to establishing the concept of quiescence as an actively regulated state by identifying endothelium-produced neurotrophin-3 as a pro-quiescence signaling molecule. My lab has also contributed to the identification of novel transcriptional functions of cell cycle regulators and to define the role of cell adhesion and inflammation in the quiescence of neural stem cells (Development 131:4059-4070, 2004; Nature Neuroscience 3:299-313, 2006; Nature Protocols 2:849-859, 2007; Journal of Neuroscience 29:14394-407, 2009; Nature Neuroscience 12:1514-23, 2009; plus see publication list). I am head of the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory at the University of Valencia and my research group belongs to the Spanish National Network for Cell Therapy (RETIC TerCel) and the Center for Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED) and is Prometeo´s Excellence Group of the Comunidad Valenciana since 2008. Currently, I serve on the board of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology. I am EMBO member since 2013 and scientist of the Science Program of the Fundación Botín since 2014.