Maria D. Mayán Santos

Dr. María D. Mayán is currently research group leader (CellCOM research group) at INIBIC A coruña. Dr. Mayán earned her bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) in 2000 and her Ph.D. from Complutense University of Madrid in 2006 (CIB, CSIC). She carried out two post-doctoral stays in London, at the Imperial College London and Clinical Sciences Centre. In July 2008, she has been named Honorary Research Fellow at the Imperial College London. In March 2010, she joined the INIBIC A Coruña as a junior research group leader within the Division of Rheumatology. Since 2010, her research was focused on the study of the molecular mechanisms responsible for the articular cartilage degeneration that occurs in patients with osteoarthritis (OA). Their results were very well received at several international conferences (selected for oral presentation or keynote speaker). Dr. Mayán group ‘s work was awarded the Price on the category of Arthritis and on the category of Basic Science giving annually to members of the Spanish Society of Rheumatology (SER). Her research group has become a worldwide leading expert in Cx43 functions. María D. Mayán has obtained 9 predoctoral fellowships as PI. She organized more than 11 workshops and conferences with international participation, she got 4 research grants as PI. Her group published several reports and they got a US patent approval for the treatment of arthritis. She supervised 2 Doctoral Thesis (international doctorate mention) and she is supervising 4 PhD students, 1 postdoctoral fellow and 1 master student. She was also involved in collaborative projects that were presented to Horizon 2020 as PI or coordinator (ERC-Starting Grant, Principal Applicant Human Frontier Science Program, HFSP and coordinator in the topic PHC-16-2015). In the case of the ERC-Starting Grant she was evaluated as “Excelent” and “Very good” (independent thinking, beyond the state of the art and conduct ground-breaking research); and the proposal was evaluated as “ambitious and expected to deliver useful results and could be of great economic impact”. The final report of the evaluation was B+; it is of high quality but not sufficient to pass to Step 2 of the evaluation. Dr. Mayan is member of many professional associations and served as advisory committee and reviewer of several funding agencies and is editorial board member and reviewer for may journals and books.