María Mittelbrunn received the degree of Doctor in Biomedicine, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the School of Medicine at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2006, and performed postdoctoral work at Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) (Madrid, Spain) from 2007 to 2016. Since 2017, she is Group Leader of the Immunometabolism & Inflammation Laboratory at the Molecular Biology Center (Madrid). Since 2021, she is Research Scientist of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) .
Among her original contributions as PI are the demonstration that the deterioration of immune system function with aging not only compromises the response to infection, cancer, vaccination, or predisposes to autoimmunity but also increases the risk for cardiovascular, metabolic, and cognitive decline, thereby placing the immune system as a controller of healthy aging. Dr Mittelbrunn has contributed to decoding the molecular mechanisms by which aged T cells contribute to inflammaging and age-related diseases. Additionally, she has proposed new therapeutic targets to delay age-related multimorbidity and to reverse aortic aneurysms, thus preventing sudden death due to aortic dissections.
She has obtained funding from the major European and Spanish funding organisations, including an European Research Council Starting Grant in 2016, and Consolidator Grant in 2022.
For her scientific achievements, she has been awarded with Doctoral thesis Extraordinary Prize (2006), LÓREAL UNESCO for Women in Science (2015), BANCO SABADELL AWARD for Biomedical Research (2022), and Royal Spanish Academia of Science for young researchers among others. Since 2024, she is Visiting Professor at CCTI, Columbia