Dr. Maria Marti Solano

Biography

Maria obtained her PhD in Biomedicine from Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (Spain) under the joint supervision of Dr. Manuel Pastor and Dr. Jana Selent. She applied advanced computational structural biology techniques to study biased agonism in G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) implicated in antipsychotic treatment. She joined the group of Professor Peter Kolb in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Philipps University Marburg (Germany), employing chemoinformatics and virtual screening methods to search for conformation-specific receptor modulators. In 2018, she joined Dr. Madan Babu’s lab in the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK), working on a systems pharmacology project that addressed signaling variability arising from tissue-specific receptor isoform expression. She has supported highly competitive postdoctoral fellowships, including those from the Federation of Biochemical Societies and the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. Dr. Marti-Solano became a Royal Society University Research Fellow and group leader in the Department of Pharmacology in October 2022. Her research group is interested in applying state-of-the-art computational biology methods to decipher changes in molecular structure and pathway architecture, determining receptor signaling outputs, thereby enhancing the understanding of receptor pathway physiology and influencing cellular function, as well as suggesting advanced models for studying GPCRs in health and disease.

Research Interests

Experience