Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry after her research on solid supports from the Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) after several scientific stays in the laboratory of Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at the University California (Berkeley, USA). María then moved into more biomedically-oriented research, initially with the Spanish company Instituto Biomar S.A., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the University of Cardiff (UK) with Prof. R. Duncan after receiving a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined the Prince Felipe Research Center (CIPF, Valencia, Spain) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position as the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF in 2006. María is currently responsible for the Screening Platform one of the Specialist Sites in the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at the CIPF. She is part of the Strategic Committee of the Valencian Agency of Innovation (AVI) and serves as Director at Large for the CRS since 2021.

María’s research group (http://www.VicentResearchLab.com) focuses on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications - in particular the application of Polymer Therapeutics in unmet clinical needs. María has been funded by both national and European grants (several acting as coordinator, including an ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano, ERC-PoC-POLYIMMUNE, ERC-PoC-Polybraint and Fund Health La Caixa-NanoPanTher and NanoGBA) from academia as well as industry. María received several prizes including several Idea awards or the Concepció Aleixandre award to Women in Science. She is fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows 2019 and Controlled Release Society (CRS) College of fellows 2021. María has co-authored »140 peer-reviewed papers and 12 patents. 3 patents have been licensed to the pharmaceutical industry, one being used for co-founding the spin-off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions S.L.’ (Valencia, Spain) in 2012. María was the President of the SPLC-CRS up to 2013, is currently vicepresident of the specialised Chemical Biology Section of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and the chairperson in key conferences in the nanomedicine field, such as the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics and the annual Controlled Release Society meeting in 2019 in Valencia. María is also the executive editor of Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, the associate editor of DDTR, and a member of the editorial boards of key journals in the field.

Iñaki Tuñón studied Chemistry in the University of Valencia. His PhD (1993) was devoted to the development and application of continuum models and was supervised by Estanislao Silla. His post-doctoral stay was in Nancy, working with Profs J. L. Rivail and M. F. Ruiz-López on DFT/MM Molecular Dynamics simulations. After the post-doc he returned to the Department of Physical Chemistry in Valencia where he got a permanent position in 2000. He currently leads the research unit on modeling of chemical reactions in biological environments. He has been invited professor at the Université de Nancy and at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris).

INAM

Beatriu Escuder graduated in Chemistry at the University of Valencia in 1992 and obtained her Ph.D. at Universitat Jaume I in 1998. Then, she joined Prof. Nolte's group at the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow working on glycouril basket-shaped molecular receptors. Afterwards, she returned to Universitat Jaume I where she has been appointed as Associate Professor (2001) and Full Professor (2019) of Organic Chemistry. She has published over 90 papers in international peer reviewed journals and has an h-index of 36. Since 2017 she is the Academic Secretary of the UJI Doctoral School. Her research in the last fifteen years has been focused in the development of self-assembled fibrillar networks and supramolecular gels for their application in biomimetic molecular recognition and catalysis. Recently, her interest has expanded to the design of functional supramolecular materials for biomedical applications such as drug delivery and regenerative medicine.

Ramón Martínez-Máñez is full Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), he is member of the Interuniversity Research Institute for Molecular Recognition and Technological Development (IDM) and Scientific Director of the Biomedical Research Center Network in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER BBN). He is an active researcher in the field of sensing and hybrid organic-inorganic nanostructured gated materials for different applications. His publications (more than 530) have been cited over 24,000 times and has an h index of 75 (web of Science, h index of 81 and 29,000 times cited in Google Scholar). He has participated in over 100 research projects as coordinator. He has co-authored a scientific reference book published by Wiley and is co-author of 20 book chapters. He holds 54 PhD thesis supervised. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. He holds 29 patents of which four have been transferred to companies. He is co-founder of the spin-offs Senolytic Therapeutics and Match Biosystems. He received the Research Excellence Award 2016 from Real Sociedad Española de Química and the Rey Jaime I Price of New Technologies in 2018. He has been recently awarded with an ERC Advanced Grant.