Biography
Dr Ana Lopez Mengual is a Research Associate at the Department of Physics, King’s College London.
She earned her Bachelor’s in Human Biology at the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, where developed an interest in biomedical research. Following her master’s in Biomedical Bioengineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, she obtained her PhD in biomedicine at the University of Barcelona. Under the supervision of Prof. Jose Antonio del Rio, she studied the effects of chemical and mechanical cues on brain development and cell migration.
After the PhD, she decided to study the effects of mechanical cues on Alzheimer’s disease in her first postdoctoral stage at the University of Nottingham. Currently, she is a research associate at KCL under Prof. Sergi Garcia-Manyes studying cell mechanobiology.
Research
- Nuclear mechanotransduction
- Cell mechanosensing
- Optical Tweezers applications in mechanobiology
Dr Ana Lopez Mengual is interested in understanding the basic processes taking place inside the cell and in the different organelles in the presence of mechanical cues. These basic processes, like gene expression changes, protein oxidation or nuclear mechanoadaptation are key for responding to their environment.