In 2003 she received a European PhD degree from the Department of Physiology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Valencia. During her PhD, she did a pre-doctoral stay in London at The Centre for Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine in the King’s College of London- During that period she also studied how glutathione is able to modulate telomerase activity, to modify cell cycle related protein expression, and to alter the normal rhythm of cell proliferation. Then she did a post-doctoral stay in the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid led by the specialist in telomerase and telomeres María A. Blasco She was also interested in studying new genes related to longevity in collaboration with Dr. Manuel Serrano. In 2005, she joined the Catholic University of Valencia as lecturer, and was in charge of the PhD programme. In 2008, she came back to the University of Valencia and in 2011, she became full professor at the Department of Physiology. Currently, she is interested in factors conferring extreme longevity to centenarians and, together with her research group, she has already found that they are exceptionally well regulated at the mRNA level by microRNAs. Her second line of research is the study of stem cells as a useful tool to regenerate aged tissues.

Mari Carmen Gómez Cabrera gained her doctorate from the Department of Physiology of the University of Valencia in 2004 and received a thesis award. She has done 4 stays in foreign centres (The University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Liverpool and the University of Minnesota), where she worked in research groups on skeletal muscle, free radicals and physical exercise. She started working as a teacher in 2000 and is currently a full professor at the Physiology Department of the University of Valencia. Her research covers the study oxidative stress associated with physical exercise and the signalling role of reactive oxygen species in skeletal muscle. She has published more than 90 scientific papers, she is a regular contributor to prestigious international journals and has directed 13 doctoral theses. Her total number of citations is 4,000 and her h-index is 30. She has participated in 25 national research projects (5 of them as Principal Investigator) and 4 European research projects. The recognition of her research work has resulted in international research awards, such as the Catherine Pasquier Award (awarded by the Society for Free Radical Research Europe) and national awards such as the García Blanco Medal.