Professor of Molecular Biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Head of the research group " Genetic bases of Alzheimer's disease: genomic study of cellular models" in the CBMSO (CSIC-UAM). Principal investigator at CIBERNED (ISCIII). Member of the area of Neuroscience at the Institute of Biomedical Research IdiPaz.

Her scientific career began studying the molecular basis of the immune response to viral infections, and twenty years ago she moved and started to study the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). She has been principal investigator on projects and research contracts continuously since 2003. The discovery of novel functional polymorphisms associated with AD risk in the promoter of the APOE gene, published in Nature Genetics in 1998, was her first scientific contribution of high impact in the AD field.

Since 2009, her team has focused on the analysis of pathogenic cell models, using functional genomics to search for new risk factors, mechanisms and therapeutic targets for AD. One of their main interests is the study of the possible involvement of viral infections in the pathogenesis of the disease. During these years they have shown that herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV‑1) is able to induce neurodegeneration markers characteristic of AD (Santana et al Neurobiol Aging 2012), and that its effects increase in the presence of oxidative stress (Santana et al 2013).  They have also find that infection and oxidative stress impair the lysosomal system functionality (Kristen et al Neurobiol Aging, 2019) and the intracellular traficking and proteolysis of the amyloid precursor protein APP (Recuero et al J Alz Dis 2013, Llorente et al Oximed & Cellular Longevity 2020). She has also described several genetic risk factor for AD related with HSV‑1 infection, which reinforces her interest in this line of research. Besides to the study of the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration in the modles, her team is currently reinforcing the translational aspect of their studies thanks to her long lasting collaboration with Dr A Frank at the “la Paz” University Hospital. To this aim, our strategy lays on combining the study of molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration in the models with that of genetic, biochemical and metabolic biomarkers in AD patients at prodromic and early stages of the cognitive decline.

She is member of the main national and international consortia studying the genetic architecture of sporadic AD. She is a member since its creation in 2008 of the European Consortium EADI, which published the first big study of AD genetic association at a genomic scale (GWAs) (Lambert et al. Nat Gen 2009), and subsequently joined the IGAP worldwide network to study AD genetics at genomic scale. Within these consortia, she continues to participate in major discoveries about AD genetic risk (Kunkle et al Nat Genet, 2019; de Rojas et al Nat Commun 2021). She also collaborates with the leading national researchers (DEGESCO-CIBERNED) in AD genetics, collaborations that provide a great added value to the individual projects of the groups (e.g., Moreno-Grau et al Alzheimers Dement 2019; de Rojas et al J Pers Med. 2021).

She is co‑inventor in several patents, and combines her research work with regular teaching since 2003. She has directed ten doctoral theses and numerous works of initiation to research.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6477-1117