Irene Miguel-Aliaga | |
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![]() Miguel-Aliaga in 2015 | |
Alma mater | University of Oxford (DPhil) |
Awards | EMBO Member (2017) Suffrage Science award (2018) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Imperial College London National Institute for Medical Research University of Cambridge Harvard University Linköping University |
Thesis | Spinal muscular atrophy : of flies, worms and men (2000) |
Doctoral advisor | Kay Davies [1] |
Website | www |
Irene Miguel-Aliaga FRS FMedSci is a Spanish-British physiologist who is Professor of Genetics and Physiology at Imperial College London. [2] Her research investigates the plasticity of adult organs, and why certain organs change shape in response to environmental changes. [3] [4] [5] She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.
Miguel-Aliaga is from Spain and grew up in Barcelona. [4] She completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford, [1] supervised by Kay Davies on invertebrate models of human diseases. [3] [4]
After her PhD, she moved to the United States for postdoctoral research, joining the laboratory of Stefan Thor at Harvard University. Miguel-Aliaga then moved to Linköping University, where she characterised the neurons of Drosophila . [3] She was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship and joined Alex Gould at the National Institute for Medical Research, where she studied the specification of gut-innervating insulin-producing neurons. [3] In 2008, Miguel-Aliaga started her independent research career at the University of Cambridge. She was named a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow, and eventually moved to Imperial College London. [3] At Imperial, Miguel-Aliaga serves as Professor of Genetics and Physiology. [3]
Miguel-Aliaga's research investigates the plasticity of human organs, and in particular, how fully developed adult organs are impacted by environmental changes. [6] To understand these processes, Miguel-Aliaga makes use of the gastrointestinal tract, [7] as it allows for the study of how an organ senses signals from its internal and external environments. [6] To better understand the functional significance of various organs, Miguel-Aliaga compared the intestinal epithelium of males and females. She identified that different biological sexes demonstrate different brain-gut communications, particularly during production and tumour formation. [8] As part of this work, her group identified the communication pathways that exist between the gastrointestinal tract and other organs. She has continued to use the model organism Drosophila , as it shares over 60% of its genes with humans. [8]
Her publications [2] include: