Irma is a vertebrate developmental biologist by training who recently moved into the field of public health. She is currently working in a project investigating the dynamics of several infectious respiratory diseases and the flu seasonal epidemic.

Although she comes from a different scientific area and has mainly worked on the lab bench for the last few years, her interest in how science can improve human health in a fair and equitable manner brought her to the field of public health. In this challenging and exciting new path, she is combining her biomedical background with new approaches from data analysis, (digital) epidemiology and big data.

She has a degree in biology from the Autónoma University of Madrid (Spain), and did her master thesis in Leiden University (The Netherlands) and her PhD in the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência – Nova University of Lisbon (Portugal).