Alejandro del Pino Casado

I graduated with a degree in Biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2021, after which I went on to study a two-year Masters in Neuroscience at the same university, graduating in 2023. I've always been interested in the study of the nervous system, and during my studies I had the opportunity to work in several laboratories doing research in this field. I first came into contact with Alzheimer's disease when I spent a year using FIB/SEM microscopy techniques under the supervision of Dr Javier DeFelipe in the Cortical Circuits Laboratory at the CSIC-Instituto Cajal. For my Master's thesis, I spent 18 months developing a stimulation and registration patch-clamp experiment to test the differential response of prefrontal cortex pyramidal neurons to amygdalar afferents in the context of fear conditioning. During this time at the UAM Medical School, I was able to learn relevant techniques in neuroscience and electrophysiology, such as patch-clamp and stereotaxic surgery, as well as the basics of optogenetics. I've recently joined the Neurobiology of Pain group here at the Universidad de Alcalá as a research assistant with Dr Iván Rivera Arconada and Dr José Antonio López, after which I'd like to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience.