Ana Monteagudo Sánchez

Ana holds a B.Sc. in Biotechnology from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, an M.Sc. in Genetics and Genomics, and a Ph.D. in Biomedicine from the University of Barcelona, awarded with the Extraordinary Ph.D. Prize. Her research career has focused on genetics, epigenetics, molecular biology, reproductive medicine, and embryonic development. She completed her Ph.D. between Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge (Barcelona, Spain) and the University of East Anglia (Norwich, United Kingdom) under the supervision of Dr. David Monk, an international expert in imprinting disorders and DNA methylation. Her doctoral research addressed the role of genomic imprinting in the human placenta and during early embryo development, combining transcriptomic, epigenomic, and functional approaches, including CRISPR/dCas9-based epigenome editing. During this period, she also carried out an EMBO-funded international research stay in the laboratory of Dr. Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla at the Helmholtz Stem Cell Center in Munich, Germany. Her Ph.D. work resulted in eleven publications, four of them as first author. After completing her Ph.D., she joined the Greenberg laboratory at the Institut Jacques Monod (Paris, France) to study the role of non-canonical DNA methylation in early mammalian development. During this period, she was awarded two competitive French postdoctoral fellowships from the Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer (ARC) and the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM), which enabled her to spend three years in the laboratory. Her work was focused on the interplay between DNA methylation, histone modifications, and chromatin architecture during early embryonic development, using next-generation sequencing-based chromatin profiling techniques and a CRISPR/Cas-based epigenome editing toolbox. This work resulted in two first-author publications in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology and Nucleic Acids Research. In 2023, she joined Dr. Felip Vilella’s laboratory at Fundación Carlos Simón/IIS INCLIVA, where she is developing her research career in reproductive medicine and epigenetics. Since joining the group, she has secured competitive funding as Co-PI in a FIS project and as PI through an Emerging Research Group grant from the Generalitat Valenciana. In January 2026, she was awarded a Miguel Servet contract, which allowed her to establish herself as an emerging researcher in reproductive medicine and epigenetics. During her time at INCLIVA, she has also been actively involved in mentoring by supervising one final degree project and three Master’s theses, and she is currently supervising a Ph.D. student.