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Alexandra Olaya-Castro was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She completed her undergraduate degree in Physics Education at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas and spent several years working with ICFES, developing physics tests for large-scale educational assessments in Colombia. She combined her master’s studies at Universidad de Los Andes, where she completed her MSc thesis on Quantum Coherence in Excitonic Bose-Einstein Condensates under the supervision of Prof. Luis Quiroga. In October 2002, she moved to the University of Oxford (Somerville College) to pursue a DPhil in Quantum Physics, supervised by Prof. Neil Johnson. She was supported by the Clarendon Fund Scholarship, Overseas Research Student Award, and Somerville Senior Scholarship. During her doctoral studies, she was awarded a three-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, University of Oxford, to develop research on quantum processes in complex molecular systems. In November 2008, she was awarded a five-year EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship, allowing her to begin an independent research career at University College London. She was appointed permanent Lecturer in September 2011 and promoted to Reader in September 2015, and full Professor of Physics in 2018. Throughout her career, she has made significant scientific contributions to the understanding of quantum coherence and correlations in various many-body quantum systems, and her main aim is to continue leading a developing team to expand understanding of quantum phenomena in complex systems and bridge quantum science with biosciences.