Zaida Alvarez is currently a Ramon y Cajal and Principal Investigator of the Biomaterials for Neural Regeneration Group at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Spain. She is also a Visiting Scientist at the Simpson Querrey Institute for Bionanotechnology at Northwestern University, Chicago, USA.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Elisabeth Engel. In 2015, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University, Chicago, as a self-funded postdoctoral fellow to work on peptide amphiphiles for neural regeneration. In 2019, she was promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Feinberg Medical School at Northwestern University, where she continues her research in spinal cord regeneration and in vitro platforms for IPS modeling. She is also a consulting engineer in two start-up companies in the USA. She has 4 patents assigned to AmphixBio Incorporation and has received numerous awards such as the Young Baxter Investigator Award in 2019, the Rafael Hervada Award in 2021 and the Women in Science Nanotechnology Award in 2022.