Profile

I am a happy, enthusiastic epidemiologist.

I love travelling, hiking, running, playing badminton, reading, dancing and meeting my friends 🙂 🏃‍♀️
During the last 8 years, I have lived in 10 different countries and worked in 5 different continents!  🌍

I was born in a beautiful place in Northern Spain 🇪🇸 called Gijón. However, I have lived outside of Spain for almost 7 years now. In the UK 🇬🇧 I have lived in Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool.

Through my work and travels, I became fascinated by other cultures and traditions and now I have friends from almost every country in the world! 🗺️😊

I work as a field epidemiologist which means that my job is to be a “detective” of infectious diseases and epidemics . When an outbreak starts, I conduct an investigation to find how it started (the source) and we try to stop it and preventing from it to happen again.

I have worked in Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 in an Ebola Treatment Centre during the largest Ebola Virus epidemic in history (2014/2015).

I have worked for 2 years in Brazil 🇧🇷 during the Zika Virus Epidemic. I focussed my PhD in understanding better the Zika Virus Epidemic in South America.

I have worked in Southern India  🇮🇳 (Bangalore) trying to investigate an epidemic that was causing many children to die due to neurological disease such as encephalitis.

I currently work for the European Union 🇪🇺, for a centre called the European Centre for Disease Control (European CDC). I am based in Malta and I travel around Europe and other continents every few months.

I believe that working in public health with epidemics is my way of helping to make the world a better place! 🌍💚

A typical day when there is an outbreak in Europe:

I will gather all the information about the bug, the patients infected and the possible way they got infected with the bug. Then, we try implementing ways of controlling that infection. 🕵️‍♀️

For example, last week there was an epidemic of a virus called Norovirus in a ship. We had to interview the patients, isolate them in cabins in the ship and change the way they were serving food and cleaning.

A typical day during epidemics such as Ebola:

I was working in a special hospital for Ebola patients. We had to wear special clothes that are called Personal Protective Equipment. Patients would arrive at the hospital suspected of having Ebola and we had to diagnose them and isolate them. If a patient was positive, we then had to find their “contacts”. This is called contact tracing. Contacts of Ebola patients may be “incubating” Ebola and need to be isolated in quarantine. 🕵️‍♀️

When there is no urgent epidemics, I do research trying to understand how to prevent and control future epidemics. I communicate our findings in conferences, meetings and schools and I teach at University.