Blanca Rodriguez MSc, PhD

Blanca was born in Valencia, Spain, where she attended the Lycee Francais de Valencia and graduated as an Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, in 1997. She then started a Ph.D. in the Integrated Laboratory of Bioengineering supervised by Prof. Chema Ferrero and at the same time became an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Biomedical Instrumentation at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. During her Ph.D. studies, she investigated the causes of extracellular potassium accumulation during acute ischemia using a mathematical model of the single-cell action potential. After graduating in 2001. Blanca joined Prof. Natalia Trayanova's group at Tulane University in New Orleans (now at Johns Hopkins University), as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Blanca Rodriguez's research focused on the mechanisms of cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks in normal and globally ischemic hearts. In 2004, she won the First Prize in the Young Investigator Award Competition in Basic Science of the Heart Rhythm Society. After spending two years in New Orleans, she joined Oxford University in August 2004, as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. David Gavaghan, funded by the Integrative Biology Project. From 2007 to 2013, Blanca Rodriguez held a Medical Research Council Career Development fellowship and she has also been awarded funding by European Commission, Royal Society, EPSRC, Wellcome Trust, BHF, and Leverhulme Trust. She is currently a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science and Professor of Computational Medicine.