Staff member

CV Summary

Amayra Hernández-Vega (Ramón y Cajal Researcher)

Our research

Our long-term goal is to understand neuronal degeneration in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Tau's contribution to it. We aim with this knowledge to find the best therapeutic strategies to prevent this devastating disease. To this end, my team combines in vitro reconstitution and neurons in culture.

Emerging evidence highlights the urgent need for early intervention in AD, and a major global effort is underway to validate the best biomarkers to detect the disease before symptoms appear. Yet, to truly succeed in the race against dementia, we must also gain a deeper understanding of how the disease progresses at the cellular and subcellular levels.

Neurons are highly specialized cells with long, thin projections that depend on continuous intracellular transport. This unique morphology makes them particularly vulnerable to traffic disruptions and other perturbations affecting the delivery of essential cargo to synapses.

Our research focuses on deciphering and targeting early structural and dynamic changes in these neuronal processes - changes that may represent some of the earliest events in Alzheimer's disease.

Link to external Group Website

Grants

2026 ⎯ 2030	Consortium Grant: Pasqual Maragall Researchers Programme (PMRP 2024) - 2024-1366 MAPtoAD
2026 ⎯ 2028	Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento 2024 (PID2024-160613OA-I00) - TauiST
2024 ⎯ 2026	Ayudas para Incentivar la Consolidación Investigadora (Grants to Encourage Research Consolidation), CNS2023-145393
2024 ⎯ 2025	BIST Ignite seed stage.
2023 ⎯ 2027	Ramón y Cajal contract, RYC2021‐031779‐I

Collaborators

• Natalia Rodriguez Muela, Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Dresden, Germany.


• Thomas Surrey, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain.


• Lorena Ruiz Perez, University of Barcelona, UB - Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, IBEC


• Giuseppe Battaglia, IBEC, Barcelona, Spain.