María del Carmen
Marín Pérez

Dr. María del Carmen Marín Pérez is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Oded Béjà.

Her main area of research is rhodopsins. Many organisms sense light using rhodopsins, photoreceptive proteins containing a retinal chromophore.

Her host laboratory recently found a previously uncharacterized rhodopsin family dubbed bestrhodopsins. Bestrhodopsins are found in marine unicellular algae and have unprecedented architecture. In her current research, María aims to further characterize this recently detected bestrhodopsin family and to examine the interplay between architecture and role. She will use various OMICS (genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, and metatranscriptomics) to search for hidden rhodopsin architectures. She hopes that the new advances and knowledge will have significant direct and indirect influence on the fields of optogenetics and rhodopsins.

María was born in Quesada, Spain. She studied for her BSc in chemistry at the University of Jaén and her MSc in the characterization of chemical systems at the University of Alcalá. She then completed her PhD in chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Siena under the supervision of Prof. Massimo Olivucci. After years of training in computational chemistry and several collaborations with well- known biophysics groups around the world, María became interested in the biophysics characterization of photoreceptors and thus became an interdisciplinary researcher. For this reason, she moved to Tokyo to work with Prof. Keiichi Inoue, supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Outside the laboratory, María has had a professional career as a rugby player. She also loves photography and travelling around the world.