Joaquina obtained an MSc in Biotechnology from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain), carrying out her MSc thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). She then moved to the US to undertake a PhD at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY), first funded by “laCaixa” Foundation and then by a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellowship. There she joined Gregory Hannon’s laboratory to study how long non-coding RNAs regulate stem cell differentiation and self-renewal using haematopoiesis as a model. Joaquina joined James Briscoe’s lab at The Francis Crick Institute to continue pursuing her interest on how the non-coding genome controls cell fate decisions. During her postdoc, she uncovered two cis regulatory strategies controlling cell fate choice between ventral neural progenitors.
Joaquina obtained a Wellcome Career Development Award to start her laboratory at UCL LMCB. Her work combines state-of-the-art genomics, proteomics and imagining, using stem cell models and embryology with the goal of achieving a molecular understanding of how cis-regulatory elements drive cell fate decisions in development.