Publications
Latest publications of Alex Martínez Ascensión available on ResearchGate.
Research Interests
Neurodegenerative disorders; single-cell methods; sex chromosome biology; sex as a biological variable
Biography
Alex is a postdoctoral researcher at the neurodegenerative diseases area at Biogipuzkoa Health Research Institute (Donostia, Spain) and a visiting research at UK-DRI at Prof. Ryten’s lab. They completed their BSc in Biochemistry at University of the Basque Country (Spain) in 2014 and early on developed an interest in Bioinformatics, finishing their MSc at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2018). They finished their PhD in 2023 at Biogipuzkoa, which focused on elucidating the heterogeneity of dermal fibroblasts by pooling dozens of single-cell RNA-seq studies.
Afterwards, they pivoted onto neurodegeneration, with a focus on ALS and MS, following their research at Biogipuzkoa. Due to the persisting gender biases in biomedical research, one of their active research points focuses on the integration of sex as a categorical variable in their studies, paying special focus onto how the biology of sex chromosomes and the effect of hormones affects gene transcription and splicing. To that end, they performed a short stay at Francisco Garcia’s group at Principe Felipe Research Centre (Valencia, Spain), continuing in active collaboration; and recently joined Prof. Ryten’s group thanks to a competitive fellowship from the Education Department of the Basque Government.
