Belen Ramos Josemaria

Belén holds a degree in Health Sciences (Veterinary Medicine) (1998), a DEA in Biochemistry (2000), Molecular Biology and Genetics, and a PhD in Physiology (2002) from the University of Extremadura. She completed research stays at several research centers, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Department of Biochemistry) in the United States and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). Her postdoctoral training took place at Harvard Medical School (USA) in the Department of Pathology from 2003 to 2007 under the Fulbright/MCyT program, and for several months at Tufts School of Medicine (USA) in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology.

In 2007, Belén established the Molecular Psychiatry Research Laboratory at Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute, supported by the Marie Curie International Reintegration Grants program, and has led this group from then until the present. She has held Miguel Servet I and Miguel Servet II research positions. She is part of MERITT research group recognized by AGAUR, coordinating one of its five research lines, and has been a member of CIBERSAM’s G11 group since 2008. Associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for 8 years. Belén is the Scientific Director of the Biobank-Neurological tissue bank of Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu since 2016 and is affiliated with the UC-UVIC School of Medicine since 2018.

Her scientific career has focused on understanding the development, function, and dysfunction of the nervous system. In recent decades, her work has centered primarily on identifying altered molecular pathways in the brain in psychotic disorders related to developmental, inflammatory, and immune response processes, with a particular interest in transcriptional regulatory factors. In addition, she investigates these regulators and inflammatory pathways as potential peripheral biomarkers associated mainly with cognitive functioning and symptom severity in psychosis.