Eulàlia de Nadal graduated in Veterinary Medicine in 1995 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2000 from the same university. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher (‘Ramón y Cajal’) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, and at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. From 2009 to 2016, she served as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Department of Medicine and Life Science at UPF. Since 2017, she has been a Full Professor at the same university. Eulàlia de Nadal has led the Cell Signaling research group there since 2005. In 2018, she also became an Affiliated Group Leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). She received two ICREA ACADEMIA awards in 2012-16 and 2021-25 in recognition of her research excellence. Eulàlia de Nadal was vice-director at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences at UPF (2015- 19), Vice-Rector for Knowledge Transfer at UPF (2021-2023), and a member of the Culture Commission of the same university (2018-2021). Additionally, she was a member of the PhD Advisory Committee at IRB Barcelona (2020-2023). Currently, she is the Rector of UPF (March 2023-present).
Her research focuses on understanding how cells detect and respond to environmental changes, with a particular emphasis on characterizing stress signal transduction pathways regulated by MAP kinases of the Hog1/p38 family, also known as stress-activated MAP kinases (SAPKs). Effective stress adaptation requires modulating several fundamental aspects of cell biology, including the cell cycle and gene expression. The physiological and pathological importance of stress-responsive signal transduction pathways drives her efforts to design drugs that block some of the downstream targets controlled by stress-responsive kinases, such as RB, and to develop specific therapeutic drugs to inhibit cell proliferation.