NORA
FERNANDEZ JIMENEZ

Nora Fernandez Jimenez is an Assistant Professor of Medical Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine and Nursing of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and a researcher at the Biobizkaia Health Research Institute. Since 2023, she has held the accreditation of Associate Professor with an A rating in research and has been granted the exemption to apply for Full Professor accreditation by ANECA. In her teaching career, she has taught in Basque, Spanish, and English, supervised two PhD theses, one master's thesis, and 12 undergraduate dissertations. Additionally, she is currently co-supervising two PhD theses and the training program of a postdoctoral researcher. In terms of research, she obtained her PhD in the Genetics of Celiac Disease (CD) in 2014 at UPV/EHU and completed her postdoctoral training at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, specializing in the analysis and interpretation of genomic and epigenomic data. She is currently a member of the Immunogenetics Research Laboratory (IRLab) at UPV/EHU and Biobizkaia, leading projects focused on the epigenetics of CD, child development, and the placental methylome. She has published a total of 48 indexed articles in international journals, most of them in the first quartile (h-index = 18 in Scopus, with over 1,100 citations). She has also authored several book chapters and received grants and awards, including the IARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (Marie Curie-PEOPLE-COFUND) and the Sara Borrell grant from ISCIII. She holds a Spanish patent for a blood biomarker for CD and has led a project funded by the Basque Government to validate its use as a complementary diagnostic tool. In 2021, she obtained an ISCIII-funded project to study DNA methylation patterns in atypical CD, in collaboration with researchers from San Carlos Hospital in Madrid. Preliminary results are promising. In recent years, she has worked in the Infancia y Medio Ambiente (INMA) cohort as an expert in epigenetics and has led international studies within the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics (PACE) consortium, focusing on the DNA methylation patterns of the placenta. As a result, she co-authored a paper in Nature Communications on the impact of maternal smoking and was the first author of a study published in Communications Biology on the relationship between maternal body mass index and placental DNA methylation. Recently, she led a study identifying potential causal relationships between placental methylation and neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and these findings have been recently accepted for publication at Nature Communications. Thanks to these advancements, she has obtained approval from the Ethics Committee of Cruces University Hospital for the systematic collection of placental and maternal plasma samples upon admission to the births unit. Additionally, she has been awarded two projects as Principal Investigator at UPV/EHU and the Basque Government, respectively, with a total budget of more than €130,000 to start studying the first metabolic and neurological outcomes of childhood development in the new cohort.