Prize Winners

Curriculum Vitae

Ph.D. in Physics. Research Professor at the CSIC. Institute of Micro- and Nanotechnology.

She began her research career in 1997 as a Ph.D. student working on AFM nanolithography, under the supervision of Professor Ricardo García at the IMM-CSIC. In Prof. García’s laboratory, she had the opportunity to collaborate briefly with Prof. Heinrich Rohrer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Her dissertation received the University of Santiago de Compostela’s Special Doctoral Award. After completing her doctoral dissertation, her scientific interests shifted toward the development of nanomechanics-based sensors. As a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Denmark–Mikrolektronik Centret, she developed nanomechanical sensors made of polymeric materials.

Since 2005, she has focused her research on the application of nanomechanics to biology and biomedicine. She is a co-founder of the technology companies Mecwins SA and Nanodreams SL.

Among her achievements is the development of optonano-mechanical sensors for the detection of low-abundance proteins in blood for early cancer diagnosis, which have also demonstrated the ability to detect HIV just one week after infection and are currently being developed for the detection of SARS-CoV-2. She has been a pioneer in the identification of pathogens based on their physical properties and in the search for new physical biomarkers of cancer in mechanobiology.

Jury ruling

The jury of the Rei Jaume I Prize in New Tecnologies has unanimously decided to award Monserrat Calleja for her applies leading advances from basic research in physics to practical innovations in the clinical field. The jury of new technologies points out her work on biomolecular markers and nanomechanical sensors for early detection of cancer and infectious diseases, as well as antibiotic resistance identification, all of these major challenges in the field of human health.
We congratulate Professor Calleja on her award and encourage her to keep pushing the boundaries of new technologies.