IBEC – Irene Marco-Rius

Dr. Irene Marco-Rius (orcid.org/0000-0001-5076-8526) is the co-PI and scientific director of the BLOC project. She is also the lead researcher at IBEC of the hyperpolarized magnetic resonance (MR) and NMR spectrometer technology aspects of the project.

She completed her PhD in the group of Prof. Kevin Brindle at University of Cambridge (UK) in 2014. She had previously studied a BSc in Physics at Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain, 2005-2009) and a MSc in Medical Physics and Biomedical Optics at University of Heidelberg (Germany, 2009-2010). She worked as postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Dan Vigneron at University of California San Francisco (USA) and Dr. Arnaud Comment at Cambridge (UK). In 2018 she received a prestigious “la Caixa” Junior leader fellowship to start her own line of research at IBEC. Her research is focused on the development of non-invasive MR imaging and spectroscopy technologies to study metabolic pathologies in human disease and evaluate response to treatment.