Research - Our Team

Rebeca Santano is a human health biologist with a background in experimental research and data science.
She holds a degree in Health Biology from the Universidad de Alcalá, where she began her research career in the Cell Biology Department. During her final undergraduate year, she joined the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as an exchange student and conducted a research project at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, focusing on functional assays for triple-negative breast cancer treatments. She also completed an internship at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, contributing to studies on malaria during pregnancy.
In 2016, Rebeca earned a Master’s degree in Tropical Parasitic Diseases from the Universidad de Valencia, where her research centered on immune resistance mechanisms to Echinostoma caproni infections.
From 2017 to 2022, Rebeca was a PhD fellow in the team of Carlota Dobaño and Gemma Moncunill at ISGlobal. Her work investigated the complexity of the immune system, particularly antibody responses, to combat infectious diseases and improve vaccine and diagnostic tool design. Her research focused on immune deviation mechanisms in malaria, including Plasmodium falciparum and intestinal parasite co-infections.
Since 2022, Rebeca has continued as a postdoctoral fellow in the same group. In 2024, she completed a six-month postdoctoral stay at Yale University in the Yale Center for Systems & Engineering Immunology (CSEI), supported by a joint Fulbright and Spanish Government fellowship.