Dr. Mariona Graupera is an ICREA Research Professor at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute. She received her training as a PhD working with Prof. Jaume Bosch at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona and as a postdoc with Prof. Bart Vanhaesebroeck at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and at the Bart’s Cancer Institute in London. In 2009, she established her laboratory as an independent investigator at the Institut d’Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge funded by the Ramon y Cajal program. From that moment, she embraced the opportunity to create a multidisciplinary laboratory devoted to study the mechanisms that regulate the vasculature in development, homeostasis, and disease. In February 2021, she joined the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute as Group leader with an interest to study the ties between the hematopoietic and endothelial cell linages. In June 2022, she was appointed president of the European Vascular Biology Organization. 

The Graupera lab studies how signaling events regulate vessel morphogenesis, and how this knowledge can be translated into therapeutic opportunities for diseases characterized by aberrant vessel growth. Current topics of interest are (i) How the endothelium instructs organ function in an organotypic fashion, (ii) How mural cell plasticity can be targeted to prevent disease pathogenesis and progression, and (iii) Why there is distinct endothelial spatio-temporal sensitivity to oncogenic mutations. Her research combines zebrafish and mouse models, patient derived samples, high-throughput analysis (NGS, single cell RNA sequencing, (phospho)proteomics) and high-resolution imaging.