People

Borja Ibarra

Researcher

Borja Ibarra received his PhD. in Molecular Biology from Universidad Autónoma Madrid in 2001. He made the ‘leap’ to molecular biophysics as a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Carlos Bustamante lab at UC Berkeley. Back in Spain, he applied single molecule manipulation methods as optical tweezers at the CNB-CSIC (Madrid) to study biological molecular motors at single molecule level. He joined the Nanobiosystems department at IMDEA Nanoscience in 2010, where he started the Molecular Motors Nanomanipulation Lab.

 borja.ibarra@gmail.com
 borja.ibarra@imdea.org

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Rebeca Bocanegra

IMDEA Staff / Researcher

B.S. in Biochemistry, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, 2011, Universidad Autónoma Madrid.
During her Ph.D. she studied intermolecular interactions in viral assembly and viral assembly inhibition using the mature HIV capsid as a model system. As a postdoc, she worked in the National Center of Biotechnology to study the relation between protein structure, macromolecular interactions and physiological function of protein complexes. In March 2018, Rebeca joined our lab as a staff scientist.

 rebeca.bocanegra@imdea.org

Maxime Ledent

POSTDOC

PhD in Science, 2025. University of Liege, Belgium.
Maxime’s research focuses on the single-molecule dynamics of synthetic molecular shuttles, using optical tweezers.

 maxime.ledent@imdea.org

María Ortiz Rodriguez

Ph.D. Student

B.S in Experimental Sciences, 2019. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
M.S in Computational Biology 2019, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Her work is focused on understanding the stoichiometry and dynamics of the human mitochondrial DNA replication machinery.

 maria.ortiz@imdea.org

LYRA ZUMETA

Ph.D. Student

B.S in Biochemisrty 2022, Universidad Autónoma Madrid.
M.S in Biophysics 2023, Universidad Autónoma Madrid.
Lyra is currently studying the effect of temperature on the real-time kinetics of the human mitochondrial replisome.

 ivan.zumeta99@gmail.com

BRISHTI BAGCHI

Ph.D. Student

B.S in Allied Healthcare, 2018. University of North Texas, USA.
M.S in Biophysics 2023, Universidad Autónoma Madrid.
Brishti investigates the coordination of the chaperonin system Tid1/Mortalin withthe human mitochondrial replisome.

 brishti10bagchi@gmail.com

NARZAYA GAnBAT

Ph.D. Student

B.S in Nanoengineering and Nanoscience National University of Mongolia 2022.
M.S in Chemical NanoEngineering 2024, Erasmus Mundus.
Narka is working on elucidating the conformational dynamics of synthetic molecular switches.

 narzaya.ganbat@imdea.org