
Who are we?
Boston is a great center of innovation and education in the US and with a very large Spanish Scientists and engineers community. The ECUSA Boston Chapter is the meeting place for Spanish scientists living or working here. It was constituted as such in October 2014 and brings together a group of professionals related to science and technology committed to the organization’s mission.
What do we do?
We organize events and promote networking between ECUSA members. We look forward to seeing you in all of our events, which will be posted on this webpage and on our social networks profiles.
Chapter Board

Carlos A. Merino
President
Civil Engineer from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Masters in Civil / Structural Engineering from Saint Louis University. Professional Engineer with +5 years of experience specializing in transportation infrastructure projects. He currently works in Boston as Structural Engineer / Bridges.

Ferrán Barrachina
Treasurer
Ferran Barrachina is a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. His research focuses on studying the immunophysiology and immune aberrant responses in the urogenital tract to identify new diagnostic/therapeutic targets for male infertility and kidney injury. Ferran obtained his BSc in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Barcelona, his MSc in Cytogenetics and Reproductive Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and his PhD in Reproductive Medicine from the University of Barcelona.

Ada Vernet-Crua
Secretary
Ada Vernet-Crua is a PhD student in Thomas J. Webster’s nanomedicine lab at Northeastern University (Boston, MA). Prior to his arrival at Northeastern, she earned her Master’s degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at Rovira i Virgili University (2018, Tarragona, Spain) where she also earned her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry in 2017. During her PhD, Ada’s mission is to find a solution to current problems in orthopaedics such as infections and bone cancer, using nanomaterials that have little impact on the environment.
Committees

Cristina Sastre Reyero
She studied biology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and did her internship at the assisted reproduction unit of the Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron. After graduating she moved to Madrid where she took a Master’s degree in molecular biomedicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and then began her doctoral studies at the Vascular Pathology Laboratory of the Instituto de Investigaciones Sanitarias of the Fundación Jiménez Díaz with a thesis on the inflammation of atherosclerotic plaque. In February 2016 she moved to Boston to start as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. W. Taylor Kimberly’s neurology lab at Massachusetts General Hospital to investigate mechanisms of inflammation in stroke.

Carmen Morcelle
Carmen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard
(Cambridge, MA). After finishing a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Alcalá,
she completed a research master’s degree at the University College London (United Kingdom) and
later obtained a PhD in Biomedicine from the University of Barcelona.
After a first two-and-a-half-year postdoc at Fudan University in Shanghai,
she moved to Boston, where she spent a year working in
a laboratory at Harvard/Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In 2022, she joined the Ragon Institute, where
she is currently working on understanding how cells of the immune system are able
to survive and function within unfavorable environments. In ECUSA,
Carmen is co-Chair of Communication, she actively collaborates with
the Women in Science committee (MECUSA) and she is also on the board of ECUSA
Boston.

Julia Ramirez Moya
She studied Biochemistry and did her masters in Molecular Biomedicine at the university “Autónoma de Madrid”. Then, she joined a laboratory at the Biomedicine Research Institute, in Madrid, where she studied RNA regulatory mechanisms in cancer and obtained her Ph.D. in 2021. Currently, she is in Boston working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Boston Children’s Hospital – Harvard Medical school studying the role of non-coding RNAs and RNA editing in cancer.

Rocío Fuente
Rocío Fuente Pérez has a degree in biology, a master’s degree in cancer and biomedicine and a PhD in paediatric nephrology. As part of her PhD program, she worked at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute (Mouse genomics laboratory). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University with a Marie Curie European Fellowship to study the use of stem cells in the regeneration of cartilage disorders. She is currently an active collaborator in the ECUSA association as the person in charge of MECUSA (Women and Science) and Mentoring programs in Boston.
Contact
Let’s talk
Email us to our Ecusa Boston email address: boston@ecusa.es or fill out the
contact form below.