Dr. Maria Vivero-Lopez is a Ramón Areces Postdoctoral Fellow working on the rational design of medicated contact lenses (CLs) to combat biofilm formation at the University of Nottingham under the supervision of Prof. Morgan Alexander.
She obtained her PhD in Pharmacy from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2022, supervised by Prof. Carmen Alvarez-Lorenzo and Prof. Angel Concheiro. Her PhD Thesis focused on the development of new techniques to endow hearing aids and CLs with the ability to host and sustainably release substances capable of preventing biofilm formation or addressing already established infections under a Xunta de Galicia predoctoral fellowship. During her PhD, she carried out a 3-month predoctoral secondment at Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) to evaluate in vitro the release profiles of different active compounds from medicated CLs using microfluidics systems. Additionally, she conducted various secondments at Ocupharm company (Madrid, Spain) for the in vivo assessment of different ocular drug delivery systems.
She is an active member of the Controlled Release Society, where she serves on the Executive Team of the Young Scientist Committee (YSC), the Ocular Delivery Focus Group and the YSC of the Spanish-Portuguese Local Chapter. She is also a member of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB) and the Spanish Society for Industrial and Galenical Pharmacy (SEFIG), Her research has garnered recognition, including the VIII Julián Francisco Suárez Freire Award from the Royal Academy of Pharmacy of Galicia and the 2023 Julia Polak European Doctoral Award from the European Society for Biomaterials.
Besides lab work, Maria enjoys meeting new people, visiting new places, listening to live music, and making plans with her family and friends.
