Maria Del Mar Ortega-Villaizan

Dr. Ortega-Villaizan obtained a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Alicante, Spain, in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Sciences (Fish Population Genetics) at the University of Tohoku, Japan, in 2005. In her postdoctoral period, she began working as a researcher at the Institute of Research, Development, and Innovation in Healthcare Biotechnology in Elche (IDiBE), University Miguel Hernandez (UMH), Spain. Dr. Ortega-Villaizan was working as a postdoctoral researcher in what would be her current research line, which is the search of therapies and prophylactics against viral pathologies in aquaculture, specifically in the context of the fish immune response. In 2014, she was granted an ERC Starting Grant, which commenced in 2015 at the IDiBE-UMH. Dr. Ortega-Villaizan was leading her own laboratory to investigate the crosstalk between red and white blood cells in the context of viral infections and DNA vaccine immunizations to elucidate the role of red blood cells in the fish immune response. Since 2018, she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UMH. Her current research interests are the red blood cells of fish and their involvement in fish immune response and as target cells in the search for therapies or prophylactics against fish viral infections.