Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry after her research on solid supports from the Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) after several scientific stays in the laboratory of Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at the University California (Berkeley, USA). María then moved into more biomedically-oriented research, initially with the Spanish company Instituto Biomar S.A., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the University of Cardiff (UK) with Prof. R. Duncan after receiving a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined the Prince Felipe Research Center (CIPF, Valencia, Spain) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position as the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF in 2006. María is currently responsible for the Screening Platform one of the Specialist Sites in the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at the CIPF. She is part of the Strategic Committee of the Valencian Agency of Innovation (AVI) and serves as Director at Large for the CRS since 2021.

María’s research group (http://www.VicentResearchLab.com) focuses on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications - in particular the application of Polymer Therapeutics in unmet clinical needs. María has been funded by both national and European grants (several acting as coordinator, including an ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano, ERC-PoC-POLYIMMUNE, ERC-PoC-Polybraint and Fund Health La Caixa-NanoPanTher) from academia as well as industry. She is fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows 2019 and Controlled Release Society College of fellows 2021. María has co-authored »135 peer-reviewed papers and 11 patents. Three patents have been licensed to the pharmaceutical industry, one being used for co-founding the spin-off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions S.L.’ (Valencia, Spain) in 2012. María was the President of the SPLC-CRS up to 2013, is currently vicepresident of the specialised Chemical Biology Section of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and the chairperson in key conferences in the nanomedicine field, such as the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics and the annual Controlled Release Society meeting in 2019 in Valencia. María is also the executive editor of Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, the associate editor of DDTR, and a member of the editorial boards of key journals in the field.