Ana Alastruey-Izquierdo has an MsC in Microbiology and Parasitology and in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Complutense University (Madrid, Spain). She got her PhD in 2009 under the title “Molecular identification and antifungal susceptibility profile of human pathogenic fungi”. After completing her degree she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Public Health Research Institute (New Jersey, USA) working in antifungal resistance. She joined the Mycology Reference Laboratory at the Spanish National Centre for Microbiology (Madrid, Spain) in 2011 where she is working at the present as a Research Scientist. She has been a visitor Scientist at The Fungal Biodiversity Centre (CBS, Utrecht, The Netherlands), Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT, Seibersdorf, Austria) and European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK).
Her main area of research is focused on Medical mycology: Identification and early diagnosis of invasive fungal infections, standardization of antifungal susceptibility testing methods, resistance mechanisms to antifungals, the taxonomy of fungal species, molecular biology and bioinformatics.
In the last years, she has been a principal investigator in projects dealing with new antifungals, antifungal resistance, cryptic species of fungal pathogens, developing diagnostic methods for fungal infections, epidemiology and microbiome.
She has published over 125 peer-reviewed papers, including several guidelines for the diagnosis of fungal infections and book chapters. She is a regular speaker and chair of national and international conferences. She collaborates with WHO and PAHO in several projects. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Fungi and belongs to the editorial board of Mycopathologia and Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.
She is the current chair of the EFISG (Fungal Infection Study group) from ESCMID (unpaid), Spanish delegate in the ECMM (European Confederation of Medical Mycology) board (unpaid), Fellow of the ECMM (FECMM), vice president of the Spanish Society for Mycology (AEM) (unpaid), on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Joint Program Initiaive on Antimicrobial Resistance (unpaid) the co-supervisor of the EUPHEM (European Public Health Microbiology training program) from ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) in Spain. She chairs the WHO Technical advisory Fungal disease expert group (unpaid).
Ana has received research support in her laboratory from F2G and Scynexis and has given talks on behalf of Gilead, Pfizer, MSD and Astellas.