Sara Martínez de Lizarrondo (Biology and Biochemistry 2006) has been working since 2011 at the research center in Neurosciences Cyceron in the French city of Caen, where she arrived for the first time a year earlier with the goal to get the European doctorate for the thesis she was doing then at the research center Applied Medicine of the University of Navarra (CIMA).

His work in Pamplona was developed in department of Cardiovascular Sciences, under the direction of Dr. José Antonio Páramo and Dr. Josune Orbe. There he was doing research on a protease involved in cardiovascular diseases (MMP10). After the doctorate, and already in the French center, his degree program took a turn towards the fight against hemorrhagic stroke: a brain disease that affects more than one million people in the world and for which there is no cure.

Although initially she only had funding to work in this field for a year, she and her boss -she explains-, found different resources until they found scholarship from the L'Oréal-Unesco For Woman in Science Foundation: a prestigious financial aid oriented to support the most promising female researchers in the moments core topic of their degree program.

From the capital of the leave Normandy, this graduate of the School of Sciences of the University of Navarra recognizes the difficulty of the beginnings, and hopes that the future will be less uncertain. "After all, as Severo Ochoa used to say: a country without research is a country without development".