Blanca Lacruz Pleguezuelos is a predoctoral researcher at IMDEA Nutrition, pursuing her PhD in the Molecular Biosciences Program at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) since 2022, under the supervision of Laura J Marcos and Enrique Carrillo. Her work, funded by a Formación del Profesorado Universitario (FPU) fellowship, focuses on the gut microbiome and host-microbiome interactions through systems biology and artificial intelligence methodologies. In 2023, she completed a three-month research stay at the Toulouse Cancer Research Center (CRCT), supervised by Vera Pancaldi and funded by a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) grant from the COST Action ML4Microbiome.
She earned her Master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (UAM) in 2022, developing her Master’s thesis at IMDEA Food. She previously obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from UAM in 2020. During her undergraduate studies, she completed her thesis at the CBMSO under the supervision of María Yáñez-Mo with the support of a Collaboration Grant, and was awarded a UAM-BU Fellowship to study a semester at Boston University in 2018.
As part of her FPU fellowship, she also contributes to teaching activities at UAM’s Department of Biochemistry, participating in programming courses. In addition, she regularly participates in science communication initiatives.