Scientific Background

I was trained as a theoretical physicist but soon became fascinated by biological questions. I obtained a PhD in biophysics at the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC) and the Autonomous University of Madrid under the mentorship of Fernando Moreno, Ruben Perez and Guilherme Vilhena.  During my PhD, I employed molecular simulations and single-molecule experiments to investigate how DNA sequence influences its structure and flexibility. This work helped define rules governing DNA mechanics and suggested that the physical properties of DNA play a role in chromatin architecture.

For my postdoc, I wanted to understand how DNA folds inside living cells and how this folding influences cellular processes. With this in mind, in 2020, I joined Taekjip Ha's lab at Johns Hopkins University and in 2023 I moved with the lab to Harvard Medical School, where I became co-mentored by Ralph Scully.

At the time, chromatin loops were known to play important roles in gene regulation, but their contribution to DNA repair remained poorly understood. I developed and applied new experimental approaches to address this question. My work revealed that DNA double-strand breaks trigger the formation of chromatin loops that facilitate the homology search - the process by which a broken DNA searches for a matching sequence to use as repair template. Thus, beyond regulating gene expression, chromatin loops also play a key role in preserving genome stability.

My postdoctoral research convinced me that chromatin structure and dynamics are central, yet often overlooked, components of DNA repair. Driven by this insight, I established the Marin Lab at the University of Pennsylvania to investigate how chromatin architecture contributes to genome maintenance and how these mechanisms might be leveraged to improve cancer therapies.