Biography

I was born in Bulgaria, and when I was five I moved to Spain. I’ve always been fascinated by nature, so studying Biology felt like the obvious choice. I did my degree in Madrid, and I completed my undergraduate thesis in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Alcalá, where I worked on the functional characterization of maize proteins involved in hormonal signal transduction. That project is where I realised I loved doing research.

Even though genetics has always been my comfort zone, I didn’t want to stay in one lane, so in 2019 I moved to Salamanca to pursue an M.Sc. in Biology and Clinic of Cancer at the University of Salamanca. During my master’s, I joined the Epitranscriptomics and Cancer Lab led by Dr. Sandra Blanco, where I studied the role of the methyltransferase METTL1 in triggering senescence-related phenotypes in cancer. After that, I was awarded a Ph.D. fellowship to explore how epitranscriptomic regulation contributes to cancer progression and how it relates to immune infiltration. During my Ph.D., we published work linking this pathway to prostate cancer progression, and somewhere along the way I became really passionate about computational biology. A two-month internship at the CRUK Scotland Institute, using modelling approaches to analyse multiplex imaging data, really confirmed that interest.

I finished my Ph.D. in 2025, and when I was thinking about what to do next, I knew I wanted to keep developing my bioinformatics expertise. That’s what brought me to the Landry lab in 2026, which offered me the chance to combine bioinformatics with my initial passion for genetics. Here, I’m focusing on dominant negative mutations, including their detection, characterization across genes, and prediction.

Outside the lab, I love hiking, and I’m currently learning how to knit my first sweater to survive my first Canadian winter.

Research interests

My current research interest is combining molecular genetics with bioinformatics, with a focus on dominant negative mutations. In the Landry lab, I aim to characterize dominant negative variants across multiple genes of interest to identify shared patterns and build predictive models for dominant negative variants. I’m especially interested in bridging cancer-related genes with the lab’s broader genetics research.