Laura Cuffí

Laura Cuffí graduated in Biology at the University of Barcelona. She performed her Ph.D. (1990) at the Department of Pharmacology and Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) under the supervision of Dr. A. Badia and Dra. E. Vila. Her Ph.D. work was focused on the study of the effects of antipsychotic drugs on peripheral catecholamine receptors involved in cardiovascular system. During this period, she had a Master degree in Pharmacology (1987). Later on, she joined the Department of Pharmacology and Medicinal Chemistry at the Universitat de Barcelona joining the group of Prof. X. Forn; her research was about the action of lithium on adrenoceptors and dopamine receptors coupled to the adenylyl-cyclase system in the central nervous system. During this period, she held a post-doctoral Wellcome Trust and European Science Foundation fellowships (1992) to study the pharmacological regulation of neuronal calcium channels in the laboratory of Prof. A.C. Dolphin at the Pharmacology Department of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine at the University of London. In 2005, she moved to the laboratory of Dra. E. Planas at the Department of Pathology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Universitat de Barcelona, to follow her research about the effect of lithium on the expression of catecholamine receptors. Afterwards, she joined the Neuropharmacology and Pain Research Group (2008) and focused her work on the molecular study of GPCRs oligomerization and its regulation by lithium (2008). She currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine at the Universitat de Barcelona.