Dr. Isabel Varela-Nieto graduated and earned her doctorate in Chemistry, Biochemistry Section, at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). She has been a visiting guest scientist at the Medical Schools of Uppsala (FEBS Fellow, Sweden) and San Diego (MEC Sabbatical, USA). She is Professor of Research at the CSIC and group leader at the CIBER of rare diseases (CIBERER, ISCIII) in Madrid. From the early 1990s she has been studying hearing neurobiology and IGF-1 actions. She was the first Chair of the SEBBM Science for Society working group with which she actively collaborates, and member of the FEBS Network working group. She is currently the president of the SEBBM, a member of the FEBS Science and Society Committee and of the ISC Finances Committee.

Our lab uses genetically modified mouse models and a combination of cell biology, molecular biology, and biochemistry techniques to study the role of altered mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolism in human diseases. A primary analytical tool of the group is metabolomics, which enables the parallel quantification of hundreds of small molecule metabolites. The team also uses computational approaches to integrate datasets from multi-dimensional analyses, including metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics, with the aim to model aging-related disorders and to generate mechanistic hypotheses that will be cross validated experimentally.