Marta Artola completed her Ph.D. studies in 2014 at the MedChemLab at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in Spain under the supervision of M Luz Lopez-Rodriguez, where she worked on the validation of the FtsZ protein as a new therapeutic target for antibacterial drug discovery. During this period, she visited Prof. Sieber’s Lab at Technische Universität München (TUM) in Germany to study the antibacterial activity of her compounds. Later, she joined Prof. Baran’s Lab at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, where she was involved in the total synthesis of Ingenol photoaffinity probes. In 2013, she was awarded the JANSSEN-CILAG prize by the Spanish Society of Medicinal Chemistry (SEQT). In 2015, Marta moved to Leiden University (The Netherlands) as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Herman Overkleeft. During her postdoc, she developed conformational inhibitors and activity-based probes for various glycosidases. In 2019, she was appointed as an assistant professor in the Medical Biochemistry Department at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, where she leads her independent research group. Her group combines organic chemistry, chemical biology, and biochemistry to develop inhibitor libraries, protein degraders, and activity-based probes for carbohydrate processing enzymes, aiming to address unmet medical needs in target validation, diagnostics, and drug discovery.

Marta teaches two M.Sc. courses, Chemical Biology and Biosynthetic and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, at Leiden University. She is co-author of more than 55 publications, two patents, and has supervised three PhD and 15 M.Sc. theses (seven PhDs currently ongoing). Recently, she was awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant with the main idea of developing a novel targeted protein degradation strategy for the therapeutic regulation of Golgi proteins.

Laia Josa-Culleré graduated with a degree in Chemistry from the University of Barcelona and completed a Master’s in Organic Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. She then pursued her PhD (2013-2016) at the University of Oxford working in the group of Mark Moloney, focusing on the synthesis of natural product derivatives with anticancer and antibiotic properties.

In her first postdoctoral position (2016-2019), Laia worked at the spin-out company OxStem with Angela Russell, where she led drug discovery projects aimed at identifying small molecules that induce differentiation in acute myeloid leukemia cells. In 2019, she returned to her hometown of Barcelona with a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, joining the Medicinal Chemistry & Synthesis group led by Amadeu Llebaria to explore photopharmacology applications in oncology.

Since 2025, she leads the Drug Discovery & Medicinal Chemistry group at the Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC) in Barcelona. Her group focuses on developing innovative chemical strategies to target and eliminate cancer stem cells. Laia also serves as the Secretary of the EFMC Young Scientists Network and the President of the SEQT Early Career Scientists.

Eva Serrano Candelas graduated with a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Valencia in 2006. She then pursued a Master’s in Biomedical Research (2008) and a PhD in Biomedicine (2012) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona studying the role of RCAN proteins on Lymphocyte Development and Function.

From 2013 to 2018, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Immunobiology group led by Dr. Margarita Martín Andorra at the Department of Biomedicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Barcelona, and at the Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomèdica. During her postdoctoral time, she analyzed the role of different proteins and drugs in mast cell differentiation, migration and in pathology, as well as in gastrointestinal stromal tumours. Moreover, since 2014 to 2022, Eva has been an associate professor in the Department of Biomedicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona.

Between 2018 and 2020, she completed a Master's in Bioinformatics at the University of Valencia, expanding her expertise towards computational approaches in biomedical research. Thanks to this, in 2019, Eva joined ProtoQSAR/MolDrug as a specialist in cheminformatics and bioinformatics working on the development and implementation of predictive models for different toxicological and bioactivity properties. Since 2022, she serves as the scientific director of the company, contributing with her deep interdisciplinary background to the development of predictive models in drug discovery and toxicology.