Helena Rodriguez Caro
Helena Rodriguez Caro
I am an early-career researcher interested in women’s health and the vascular system. Currently, I am working at The University of Lausanne thanks to an SNSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. During my fellowship I am investigating the plasticity of the vascular system in the maternal gastrointestinal tract during pregnancy, under the mentorship of Prof Tatiana Petrova. Prior, I obtained my PhD in Women’s and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford (Oxon. 2019), after completing the MSc in Clinical Embryology (2015) also at Oxon., as well as the BSc in Biochemistry (2014) and the Dip. Research Training Program in Biochemistry (2014) at The University of Navarra. During my PhD, I studied the role of seminal fluid extracellular vesicles in human endometrial receptivity and was awarded the Rafael del Pino Postgraduate Scholarship (Rafael del Pino Foundation, Spain) and the Gustav Born Scholarship in Biomedical Sciences (St Peter’s College, Oxon). I then did a short postdoc with Dr Christina Aye (Oxon.) to work on the OxWATCH project, a cohort study aiming to understand the effect of maternal health before and during pregnancy in the development of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. Afterwards, I joined Prof Sarah de Val’s group (Oxon.) as a postdoctoral research scientist to study the role of NFAT transcription factors and their cognate enhancers during transcriptional regulation of arteriovenous patterning. Alongside this post, I was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship at Kellogg College (Oxon.) and the COVID-19 Rebuilding Research Momentum Fund (John Fell Fund, Oxon.)