Astronaut Sara García Alonso meets with students of the new Biomedical Engineering degree to talk about ‘Biotechnology in space’

The molecular biologist and reserve astronaut Sara García Alonso will give a masterclass entitled ‘Biotechnology in space’ on Thursday 19 September at 12:00 in the Auditorium of the University of Deusto. During the talk, the expert, the latest winner of the Ada Byron Prize, will talk to students of the new Biomedical Engineering degree about the advances and new discoveries in a field that combines two of the most innovative and promising areas of modern science and technology: biotechnology and space exploration.

Sara García Alonso graduated in Biotechnology in 2012 and obtained a master's degree in Biomedical and Biological Research in 2013, both from the University of León, her hometown. In 2018, she obtained her PhD cum laude in Cancer Molecular Biology and Translational Research from the University of Salamanca and received the extraordinary PhD award from the University of Salamanca. Since 2019, she has been working as a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in the team of Spanish biochemist Mariano Barbacid, and leads an experimental oncology project to discover new drugs against lung and pancreatic cancer.

In 2021, she applied for a European Space Agency (ESA) call for astronauts. In November 2022, ESA announced that Sara García Alonso had been selected as a reserve astronaut from among 23,000 candidates. In this way, Sara becomes the first Spanish person, together with Pablo Álvarez Fernández, also from León, to be selected by the agency since Pedro Duque, in 1992, and the first Spanish woman to form part of the European Space Agency's Astronaut Corps.

In addition to her work as an ESA astronaut and her research work in the fields of biotechnology and oncology, Dr. Sara García Alonso is also dedicated to communicating and disseminating science. In this sense, in tomorrow's talk at Deusto she will talk about the advances and applications of biotechnology in the field of space and bring cutting-edge knowledge to students of the Biomedical Engineering degree, as well as to students of other engineering degrees and the general public interested in the subject.