José María de Pereda
José did his PhD under the supervision of Prof. José Manuel Andreu at the Margarita Salas Center for Biological Research (CSIC, Madrid). As a postdoc, he worked at the University of Vienna (Austria), the University of Leicester (UK), and the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (La Jolla, USA), where he specialized in the structural biology of integrins and associated proteins, primarily using X-ray crystallography. Since 2003, he has been a group leader at CIC, where he studies the structural and mechanistic basis of cell adhesion and signaling. He has contributed to understanding the architecture and regulation of hemidesmosomes, which are integrin-based cell adhesion complexes in epithelia. He also investigates the regulation of Rap1-mediated signaling and its alterations in cancer. He is currently studying how maternal anti-integrin alloantibodies affect integrin function. He carries out interdisciplinary research that integrates structural biology methods — including X-ray crystallography, SAXS, and cryo-EM — with biochemical, biophysical, and cellular approaches.