4th Transatlantic ECI GPCR Symposium

Maria obtained her PhD in Biomedicine at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona under the joint supervision of Dr. Manuel Pastor and Dr. Jana Selent, in which she applied advanced computational structural biology techniques to study biased agonism in GPCRs implicated in antipsychotic treatment. She later joined the group of Prof. Peter Kolb at the Philipps University Marburg, where she employed chemoinformatics and virtual screening methods to search for conformation-specific receptor modulators. In 2018, she joined Dr. Madan Babu’s lab in the Structural Studies Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. There, she worked on a systems pharmacology project addressing signaling variability arising from tissue-specific receptor isoform expression, with the support of postdoctoral fellowships from the Federation of Biochemical Societies (Long-Term Fellowship) and the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship). Dr. Marti Solano became a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a group leader at the Department of Pharmacology in October 2022.

Aashish was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked in the lab of Jeff McKinney on Salmonella-host interactions. He moved to California in 2008 to join the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program. There, he worked with Brian Kobilka as a graduate student to elucidate different aspects of GPCR function, resulting in a number of important contributions to our current understanding of opioid and adrenergic receptors. After finishing his medical training in May 2016, Aashish began his independent research career as the first Stanford Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine within the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology and started at UCSF in 2017.