Consuelo Borrás

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.