María Isabel Bahamonde

Maria Isabel Bahamonde was graduated as Marine Biologist for University of Valparaiso (Chile) in 1997. She achieved a Ph.D. in Life Sciences at Uinversitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2004. She has over 14 years of international experience investigating modulation and function-structure relationship of ion channels. In 2004, after her Ph.D., Dr. Bahamonde was awarded with a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and she moved to Bethesda (U.S.A.) working mainly to explore the molecular mechanics by which voltage-gated K+ channels and voltage-sensing proteins (Ci-VSP and Hv1) are activated. In 2009, Dr. Bahamonde joined the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in the framework of an international incoming Marie Curie fellowship to develop her project: Photo-activated voltage sensor domains in voltage-sensing proteins (PAVSD). In 2011, she worked as a visiting postdoc in Dr. Francisco Ciruela’s lab, to study the photo-modulation of G protein-coupled receptors by photo-switchable ligands. In September of 2013 she returned to UPF as a Researcher and Visiting Assistant Professor where she was studying the biophysical properties and pharmacological regulation of voltage-gated ion channels implicated in the physiopathology of hereditary neuronal diseases.