Dr. Iria Gomez-Tourino has been an Associate Professor at USC since 2020, and group leader of the Immunity and Small Molecules Lab. She has been awarded several fellowships and awards, amounting to more than 1,580,000€, including two prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual fellowships (King’s College London, UK, 2013-2015, and USC, Spain, 2018-2020) and more recently the Career Development Award of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (2023-2028). The latter is aimed at fostering the career of exceptionally promising researchers in the Type 1 Diabetes field, and only three researchers receive this award yearly around the globe. 67% of her publications are in D1 journals, this being the case for her last four articles (Nature Communications, Diabetologia, FASEB Journal, and Nature Immunology). Dr. Gomez is also the inventor of 3 patents, a European Union Expert Evaluator, and an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Society of Immunology (2022-2026). Her main research interests include the identification and characterization of novel anti-inflammatory small molecules for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, and the study of mechanisms of autoreactivity underlying these pathologies.