9 March 2023 – When neuroscientist Guillermina López-Bendito was elected an EMBO Member in 2020, she wasn’t new to the EMBO community. Since 2012, López-Bendito had been part of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme, which supported her to consolidate her laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante. Working in mouse embryos, López-Bendito and her team are revealing the early mechanisms that specify sensory circuits – work that could help to understand how brain circuits that process information received from the senses develop and adapt to changes in sensory experience in humans.
López-Bendito went back to her home country Spain after doing a postdoc in Oxford, United Kingdom. The Spanish scientific community, she says, is a close-knit community that has worked hard to create jobs and careers. In the past decade, Spain’s government has invested more money to support scientists and created new initiatives to bring young researchers back to the country. “Now it’s a good time to establish a lab in Spain,” López-Bendito says. As an EMBO Young Investigator, López-Bendito benefited from conferences and training. Now, as an EMBO Member, she is serving on the Young Investigator Committee to ensure the highest quality in the selection of future EMBO Young Investigators. “It opened opportunities for my lab to establish a network of excellent scientists in Europe.”
