Fitxa persona

Main professional position. Associate Professor of Microbiology, School of Medicine, University of Valencia.

Secondary professional position. Senior Investigator of Spain´s National Healthcare System (I3SNS), PI of the Virology Laboratory at the Centre for Public Health Research, (FISABIO-Salud Pública, Generalitat Valenciana).

. I obtained my PhD in Microbiology working in diagnostics, genotyping, and genetic variation of Hepatitis B and C viruses in the Laboratory of Microbiology (Dr. Jiménez de Anta) and Department of Medicine, Liver Unit (Drs. Sánchez-Tapias and Rodés) of the Hospital Clínic, University of Barcelona Medical School, from 1990 to 1997. I expanded my interests to viral immunology during a postdoctoral fellowship in the VA Palo Alto Medical Center / Stanford University Medical School, USA, with Harry B. Greenberg, working in the development of new immunological techniques to study virus-specific immunity from 1997 to 1999. In 2000, I earned a tenure-track National Healthcare System Investigator position (ISCIII), working until 2004 in the Microbiology Service of the University Hospital La Fe, and from 2005 to 2008 in the Center for Public Health Research (CSISP), now FISABIO-Public Health, Regional Health Department in Valencia, Spain. In 2008 I earned a permanent National Healthcare System Senior Investigator position (I3SNS). I was adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Practical Instructor in the University of Valencia from 2007 until 2024, and Associate Professor since then. My Lab's current main interests are in pathogenic mechanisms of viruses, viral and host determinants of protective immunity, viral immunology, and virus epidemiology. Some of the ongoing studies deal with finding mechanisms that ameliorate chronic viral infection (hepatitis, CMV), and the surveillance and epidemiology of hepatitis and respiratory viral strains associated with disease progression, vaccine failure (influenza, sars-cov-2, RSV, enteroviruses) or antiviral resistance. I have lead regional projects, national projects from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III AES, and I participate in both regional (VAHNSI) and global (GIHSN, ENPEN, ENNGS) hospital networks for severe influenza, enterovirus surveillance, and Next-Gen sequencing in Virology, and EU projects on Influenza vaccines (IMI-DRIVE) RSV (IMI-RESCEU, IMI-PROMISE) and SARS-CoV-2 (COVIDRIVE). I am Executive Board Member in the European Society of Clinical Virology and Member of the Scientific Committee of the GIHSN. During the last years, we were appointed as Emergency Diagnostics Laboratory for the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 50,000 SARS-CoV-2 molecular tests performed, and we carry an ongoing collaboration on new diagnostic techniques based in next-generation sequencing and metagenomics with the University of California, San Francisco from 2018. I am also member of CIBER-ESP (Network Center for Biomedical Research in Epidemiology and Public Health, ISCIII, Spain)..