Eva Maria obtained her BSc in Biochemistry in 2007 and PhD in Biomedicine in 2012 in Barcelona (Spain), receiving Extraordinary BSc and PhD prizes, respectively. Funded by EMBO and HFSP, she was postdoctoral fellow at MIT (USA) and the Garvan Institute (Australia). Since 2018, Eva Maria leads the “Epitranscriptomics and RNA Dynamics” laboratory at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain. Her laboratory is focused on deciphering the language of RNA modifications, and how its orchestration can regulate our cells in a space-, time- and signal-dependent manner. Eva Maria’s work has been awarded with grants from ERC (2022), AECC (2021), MERCK (2021), MICINN (2018), ARC (2018), HFSP (2014), EMBO (2013) and LaCaixa (2008). She was been awarded with the Young Researcher Prize from SEBBM-IBUB, the Young Researcher Prize from the Catalan Society of Biology (2018), and the Fisher Scientific Young Investigator Prize (2013), among others. She is an EMBO Young Investigator.

We want to understand how gene expression is regulated with surgical precision, in a tissue-dependent, spatial and temporal dimension. The ‘epitranscriptome’ offers a novel layer to control cellular fate, capable of determining the fate of RNA molecules in terms of their localization, degradation and translation, thus tuning the cellular landscape in a space, time- and signal-dependent manner.

To study RNA modifications, we employ nanopore sequencing technologies, including pioneering the development of novel algorithms to map and quantify RNA modifications, as well as optimized library to expand its applicability beyond coding mRNAs and to low-input samples. We are now applying this technology to: i) decipher the role that RNA modifications play in sperm formation, maturation and intergenerational inheritance; ii) dissect how RNA modification dysregulation leads to human disease; and iii) novel methods for early cancer diagnosis and prognosis.