My name in María Matamala Montoya, a PhD student in Cancer Metabolomics in Celia Berker’s lab. I am a 24 years old active, cheerful and sporty girl eager to learn. Originally, I am from Almería, a cosy and coastal city located in the southeast of Andalusia, Spain. I studied the Bachelor of Biotechnology and two masters; one in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biomedicine, and the other in Science of Nervous System. In addition, I worked in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg) with spatial metabolomics and in the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO, Madrid) studying cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Once I had a glimpse at the research carried out at Celia ’s lab, I instantly knew it was my place as it combines the fields I like the most: cancer and metabololomics. The ground-breaking approach of this project goes a step further including metabolomics to tackle the problem of chemotherapy resistance. In this PhD project I would like to develop organoids and xenografts from resistant patients in order to study the tumour microenvironment and cancer stem cells using cutting edge technology so as to try to find alternative treatments. I want to take this new PhD phase, not only growing as a scientist, but as a group.