Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry on solid supports from University Jaume I after several scientific stays in Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at University California, Berkeley (USA). Then, she moved to more biomedically oriented research, initially with a Spanish company Instituto Biomar SA., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics with Prof. R. Duncan after the award of a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF) as research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position, head of Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF, in 2006. Currently she is also the responsible of the Screening Platform and the Advanced Therapies Program Coordinator at CIPF. She also coordinates the Valencian Community Strategy on Innovative and Precision Medicine.

Her research group focused on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals, in particular Polymer Therapeutics, for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications and has been funded by national and European grants (including an ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano). Maria has received several prizes and awards one on her pioneer work on polymer-based combination therapeutics and two of them directly related to the novel platform developed in 2015 capable to cross the blood brain barrier with application in neurodegenerative disorders. María has a broad experience as supervisor, apart from master students she has already supervised 9 PhD students and 9 others are currently ongoing within a lab of 20 people.

María co-authored >90 peer reviewed papers (h index = 34; ≈4000 citations) and 8 patents, 2 of them licensed to the pharmaceutical industry and a third one used as foundation of the spin off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions SL’ (PTS) in 2012.