Trajectory: Osuna received her doctorate in 2010 from the University of Girona (UdG) at the Computational Chemistry Institute (IQC) under supervision of Prof. Miquel Solà and Prof. Marcel Swart. In 2010, she moved to the group of Prof. Houk at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a Marie Curie European Postdoctoral Fellowship. Since then, she has worked on the computational design of enzymes of medical and pharmaceutical interest. Osuna has 100 scientific publications, and has recently been awarded the 2023 National Research Award ‘María Teresa Toral, 2023 Premi Talent Jove Emergent from Societat Catalana de Química (SCQ), 2022 Lecture Award of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS), 2021 Marcial Moreno award by the Catalan division of the Real Sociedad Española de Química (RSEQ), 2019 Catalonian National Research Award for Young Talent (Fundació Catalana de Recerca i Innovació), and the 2016 Research Award by Fundació Princesa de Girona (FPdGi), among others. In 2015, she obtained a €1.5M project from the ERC as part of the Starting Grant call to start her independent research career at the University of Girona. Her group is currently financed by an ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2022-CoG-101088032, FASTEN), ERC Proof of Concept project (ERC-2022-PoC2-101112805, GREENZYME), two projects of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (one of which is also a proof of concept PDC2022-133950-100), and an international project within the Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0054/2020).
Research: Osuna’s research is at the interface between computational chemistry and biology. Her research focuses on the study of biochemical processes mainly related to enzyme catalysis. Her research group is developing new computational tools to predict which changes are needed in the enzyme’s structure to enable a new function, to improve a secondary reaction of interest, or expand the range of substrates and allowed reactions. The goal of her research is to enable the routine computational design of competent enzymes to enhance their use in industry for the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant compounds.
Girona, 11 March 2024
For more information: ges.iqcc@udg.edu