Maria A. Blasco, PhD, is the Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid, where she is also the head of the Telomeres and Telomerase Research Unit.

For over twenty-five years her studies have focused on demonstrating the importance of telomeres in the prevention of cancer and age-related diseases. Telomeres are the structures that protect the ends of our chromosomes, essential for genomic stability and whose length shortens with age.

During her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Carol W. Greider (Nobel Prize in Medicine 2009) at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, she isolated one of the essential genes coding for telomerase, the enzyme that maintains telomere length. Since then her work has been at the forefront of telomere biology. Among other awards, she has received the EMBO Gold Medal. She is an elected member of EMBO and has served on its board