Rate My Professor Maria Alcolea

Dr Maria Alcolea is a Principal Investigator at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and an affiliate of the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain in 2007. She completed postdoctoral training at the Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, focusing on phosphoproteomic approaches to cancer drug resistance, and subsequently joined the laboratory of Professor Phil Jones at the Hutchison/MRC Cancer Unit in 2009, where she held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship and conducted research on epithelial stem cell behaviour using genetic lineage tracing and methods from statistical physics over a period of six years.

In 2015, Dr Alcolea was awarded a Wellcome/The Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship, enabling her to establish her independent research group. Her work centres on epithelial cell fate and plasticity, with a particular emphasis on progenitor cell behaviour in squamous epithelia such as the oesophagus. Key publications include studies in Nature (2021), Nature Genetics (2020 and 2024), Nature Cell Biology (2014 and 2021), and Science (2012), addressing topics such as clonal dynamics in normal epithelium, responses to injury, and early tumour development. She has also received an ERC Synergy Grant.