Dr. Lucía Cócera Ortega graduated in Biotechnology from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2013, with a master's thesis on genetic variants involved in early-onset thrombosis at the Clinic Hospital of Valencia.
She then joined the group of Dr. Geert Boink at Amsterdam UMC in 2014, working on biological pacemakers through gene and cell therapy. She subsequently pursued a PhD under Prof. Yigal Pinto, investigating mechanisms of gene regulation in inherited cardiomyopathies using hiPSC-derived cardiomyocyte models. Her work focused on allelic imbalance in Long QT Syndrome Type 1 and the role of circular RNAs in the heart, translating these molecular insights into therapeutic strategies. Her research included stays at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology in Göttingen and at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
In 2022, Lucía was awarded a competitive ACS Postdoctoral Fellowship to join the lab of Prof. Norbert Hübner at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, where she pushed beyond single cell-type models to chart disease mechanisms across the diseased heart at single-cell and spatial resolution.
Since January 2024, Lucía has been a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Leon de Windt at Maastricht University, developing regulatable gene therapy tools that target non-coding RNAs to drive endogenous cardiac regeneration. Her research combines expertise in gene regulation, non-coding RNA biology and cardiac disease, with the goal of developing precision, regulatable gene therapies that help the heart repair itself after injury ultimately turning fundamental discovery into therapy.