María Casanova-Acebes
Since January 2021 María Casanova-Acebes is a Junior Group Leader at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO, Madrid), leading the Laboratory of Cancer Immunity. As a graduate student with Andrés Hidalgo at CNIC, she established for the first time how circadian cues control neutrophil aging and clearance from circulation, which in turn control the physiology of hematopoietic and metastasis-prone organs such as the bone marrow, and the lung (Cell 2023, JEM 2018). Awarded a Human Frontiers Long-Term postdoctoral fellowship, she then moved to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York to carry out her postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Miriam Merad, where she discovered that resident macrophages in the lung control early regulatory T cell expansion and EMT programs in lung cancer (Nature 2021). The Casanova-Acebes lab investigates how micro- and macro-environmental factors shape myeloid cells in tumors, intending to uncover new actionable targets in this compartment to treat cancer. As of 2026, María Casanova-Acebes has published >25 articles in top scientific journals, which have been cited > 8,000 times. She has received several prizes and awards, including an ERC Starting Grant in 2023, and worked as Associate Editor at Journal of Experimental Medicine. Maria is actively involved in public outreach and research dissemination projects, and she has been recently selected as a member of the Spanish Young Academy in 2023 and Secretary of the Spanish Society of Immunology. In her (little!) spare time, María is a passionate reader and loves playing with her kids.