Dr. Marta Barniol-Xicota is a Tenure Track professor at the Pompeu Fabra University. Her lab is interested on dissecting the roles of relevant enzymes – with the ultimate goal to explore their potential in therapeutics- and on the intersection nutrition-disease by exploring lipid-protein interactions. For this they use an interdisciplinary approach that blends medicinal chemistry, molecular biology, peptide chemistry, proteomics, and cell biology. She received her B.Sc. in Pharmacy from the University of Barcelona in 2011 and a MSc in Experimental Organic Chemistry in 2013. She earned her PhD in 2017 in the lab of Prof. Vázquez where she synthesized small molecules targeting ion channels. As a graduate student, Marta also worked in the labs of Dr. Hilton at UCL (UK) and Prof. Degrado at UCSF (US). After receiving a Marie Curie fellowship in 2017, she joined the Verhelst lab at KU Leuven where she developed new activity based probes and chemical methods to study membrane proteases. In October 2021 she moved to Stanford to join the Bogyo lab, first as a postdoc and from 2022 as a visiting assistant professor. There she developed a chemically modified phage display approach to identifying selective substrates and inhibitors for proteases involved in cancer.
