BARBARA
BLANCO FERNANDEZ

Barbara Blanco-Fernandez is a Ramon y Cajal grantee in the group I+DFarma (http://idfarmausc.es/) at the Department of Pharmacology, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). Barbara holds a PhD in Drug Research and Development from USC (2014), supervised by Profs. Carmen Alvarez-Lorenzo and Angel Concheiro. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Radiology at Michigan State University in the group of Prof. Erik Shapiro (2015-2017). In 2018, she was awarded a Marie Curie Cofund fellowship (2018-2020) to continue her postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, in the group of Prof. Elisabeth Engel, where she continued working as a postdoc under a CIBER-BBN contract (2020-2022). Since November 2022, she joined USC as a part-time lecturer, and since 2024 as a Ramon y Cajal Fellow. During her career, she did short stays at the University of Nottingham and the University of Aveiro and created an international network with scientists from different institutions. She has also Industrial experience, working as a junior scientist at the pharmaceutical company Reig Jofre (Spain) for developing nanocarriers for therapeutics delivery (2017-2018). She has experience teaching in different universities (UB, UPC, USC), and directing and supervising PhD, Master and Bachelor students. Her main research lines involve the development of (i) biomaterials that recapitulate the extracellular matrix for tissue engineering applications; (ii) bioengineering approaches for the development of more reliable in vitro cancer models; (iii) nanocarriers for cell imaging and drug delivery. Her scientific achievements are backed up with 25 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals (Acta Biomaterialia, Advanced Science, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces), 2 book chapter and 37 conference papers, being her h-index 16 (1285 citations).