Biography
Alicia López Bruzos (born 29 March 1993), known as Alicia L. Bruzos, is a Spanish biologist and bioinformatician.
Memories of a childhood and adolescence.
Alicia L. Bruzos was born in Lugo (Galicia, Spain) in 1993 and she is the daughter of a primary school teacher and a mine foreman. She is the fourth woman named Alicia in the ancestry of her family tree.
During her childhood, she lived in Viveiro (Spain) with her mother Alicia, and sister Beatriz because her dad died when she was four years old. In Viveiro, she lived very happy and she keeps beautiful memories and incredible friendships from this stage. All her academic compulsory education was in public institutions, first in the school CEIP Lois Tobio and then in the high school IES Vilar Ponte. She also attended the Professional Conservatory of Music obtaining an elementary music degree with two specializations: traverse flute and piano; and participated in art and literature competitions, winning several awards during these years. At the age of 14, her first international exchange to learn French took Alicia for the first time abroad, more specifically to the French Brittany (Lannion, France) and the next summer she got a summer scholarship from the Xunta de Galicia to continue learning French this time in Camblanes (France). At the age of 16, she was diagnosed with radial nerve paralysis, and during the following years, she was surgically operated on three occasions.
Precious college years!
Alicia’s mother had had the opportunity to go to college and was always telling her how important it had been for her financial independence. Alicia had no doubt that she wanted to study at university, so in 2011, she moved to Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and enrolled in a university degree in biology. Two years later, an Erasmus scholarship to study one year abroad took her to Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) where she fell in love with evolutionary biology so, she spent the summer working in the laboratory of Prof. Patrick Mardulyn and learning some basic molecular biology techniques. She remembers these years as jovial, busy, and active; she participated in university life, got involved in various Greenpeace campaigns as a volunteer, attended courses abroad, obtained a diving license and a camp monitor diploma, traveled for pleasure, worked in a museum, traveled with friends and traveled alone…
In 2015, she obtained a BSc. in Biology from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) after presenting her degree thesis with honors about photosynthesis variability under heat stress supervised by Rubén Retuerto (Ecology department). A magazine article talking about the future of biology encouraged her to major in bioinformatics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) which ended up publishing her first article with some analyses of her master thesis that were comprised in one major publication of Nature. Before taking the next step in her career, she backpacked from Spain to Croatia for a month. On that trip she lived tons of adventures, she slept in bus stations, in hostels, in friends’ houses, and even on the floor of two ferry boats. You only live once!
Her late twenties…
Alicia used her doctoral years researching the genetic causes of contagious metastases under the sea in the laboratory of Dr. Jose Tubio. In September 2016, she enrolled in a doctoral program at Universidade de Vigo (Spain) funded by a national doctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science. Due to the transfer of the ERC-funded Scuba Cancers project, she moved back to Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and enrolled in the Molecular Medicine doctoral program in her alma mater.
A doctorate can be full of trips and Alicia definitely made the most of her opportunities: she did four funded research stays in other laboratories during this stage. In 2018, she went to the laboratory of Dr. Michael Metzger of the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (Seattle, United States) to learn gene-editing techniques, and the following year, she moved to University of Galway (Ireland) to study the disseminated neoplasia of Irish cockles. In 2020, she worked in the laboratory of Prof. David Posada at University of Vigo (Spain) where she learned phylogenomic and statistical techniques that she applied to her research. Finally, in 2021 she moved to the laboratory of Dr. Young Seok Ju at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon, South Korea) to learn about transcriptomics and cell-of-origin analysis. Due to the pandemic, she had to quarantine in Seoul before moving to Daejeon and she recorded daily videos of her isolating days in South Korea. These research stays abroad not only allowed her to learn new techniques and methods for research, experience other research environments and cultural backgrounds, and establish enduring collaborations, but also to gain experience independence in science, without the direct supervision of her thesis supervisors, and by applying for her own funding to cover the expenses. An independent future PI was being cooked.
As a wanderlust soul, Alicia traveled to more than 30 countries on 4 continents and lived in France, Belgium, the USA, Ireland, South Korea, and the UK during her twenties. A travel junkie keen to combine science with her insights from around the world, Alicia got involved in several projects and activities that merged these two. During these years, she also attended many conferences and was involved in my outreach activities and media interviews (See her CV). Commitment to public outreach was a priority for her career and therefore, she tried to engage society with the excitement of science.
As a fierce supporter of women who travel, Alicia did her first solo female backpack travel in 2016 and since then, she has encouraged anyone who hesitates on undertaking a solo trip. She’s also gone on hitchhiking trips, long-distance hiking, and demanding routes, in fact, she did twice the way of Santiago, and every summer she organized a hiking weekend for a ~10-person group in which they sleep in the forest with no tent. From some trips, she has posted short films on her YouTube channel, where she shares her experiences and explores some of the issues encountered.
In September 2022, she graduated cum laude with an international mention from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). In Spain, doctoral theses graded as ‘excellent’ may also be awarded a ‘cum laude’ which requires unanimous agreement among the members of the evaluation board (secret ballot).
Her first postdoctoral experience took place at the internationally renowned The Francis Crick Institute and University College London in the United Kingdom where Alicia enjoyed working at a first-class research institution and from where she keeps two peer-reviewed publications, of which she shares first-authorship on one.
Present and future: a look full of hope
As the next step in her career, she was successful in securing a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) fellowship at Université de Caen Normandie in France. She chose this site because of the importance of having the samples right outside the doorstep, which is essential for establishing in-depth experiments and analyses both in the laboratory and in the field. Nowadays, she works in France and is looking forward to the next step in her career.
Alicia is a scientific woman hard working to build a career on science. Let’s see what happens with the next lines of this biography…
Last updated: Oct 2023