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.

Keep growing ans sharing experiences with us!

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

Jaime Ibarrola Ulzurrun

President

He studied Biochemistry and did her master’s in Biomedicine research at the University of Navarra in Pamplona. Then, he joined a laboratory at Navarrabiomed, Public University of Navarra in Pamplona, where he studied the mechanism of mitral valve disease development and obtained her Ph.D. in 2019. Currently, He is in Boston working as a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts Medical Center where he studied the role of Mineralocorticoid Receptor in Vascular Aging.

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Julia Ramirez Moya

Vicepresident – CD

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.

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

EPO

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.

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Carmen Morcelle

Communication | MECUSA

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.

Nerea Zabaleta Lasarte

MECUSA

Nerea Zabaleta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mass Eye and Ear hospital associated with Harvard Medical School (Boston), where she is characterizing the use of viral vectors for gene therapy of genetic and infectious diseases. Previously, she studied a Degree in Biochemistry and a Master in Biomedical Research at the University of Navarra. She completed her thesis at the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) on the application of in vivo gene editing as a treatment for genetic liver diseases, and during this time she was a visiting research scholar at Genethon (France) and at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (NY). Her work has been published in high-impact journals, she is a co-inventor of two patents, she received the Young Investigator Award from the Spanish Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (SETGyC) and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alfonso Martín Escudero Foundation.

Contact

Let’s talk

Email us to our Ecusa Boston email address: boston@ecusa.es or fill out the

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