Tamara Hernández-Verdeja is now working on establishing her research group at the Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas UPM-INIA in Madrid (photo: Oxel Urra).
Tamara Hernández-Verdeja shifted her research focus to chloroplasts when joining Åsa Strand’s group at UPSC and chloroplasts are still keeping her curiosity alive. End of last year, she received a Ramón y Cajal fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, enabling her to move back to Spain and establish her own research line. In this interview, we have asked her about her career, her motivation to stay in academia and her favourite memories from her time at UPSC.
You have received a Ramón y Cajal fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation last year which is very competitive. Congratulations! What does this mean for you and your career?
Yes, that were really, really good news! It is very competitive, and I was not expecting to receive this grant. It is a tenure track position funded by the Spanish Government. The purpose is the incorporation of researchers with a solid career to Spanish research institutions. The fellowship is for five years. I will need to apply for funding and pass an evaluation which might offer the possibility to get a permanent position. It is the first step to develop my own research line and start up a group. And it allowed me to move back to Spain, close to my family and friends. After being abroad for almost ten years, I now enjoy being back in Madrid.
Which topic will you set up your research around?
Chloroplasts, of course. I have so many questions about them. I will continue to study chloroplast development and signalling like I started to work with during my postdoc time in Åsa Strand’s group at UPSC, with a focus on tissular specificity. When you apply for this grant, you apply with a general overview of your research line and which scientific questions you want to answer. So, it gives me some freedom to adjust my research. I am now contacting people to set up collaborations.
What have you been doing since you left UPSC about six years ago?
At the end of my postdoc time at UPSC, I was already applying for some European and Spanish grants, but I was not successful. So, I moved back to Spain and started to look for another postdoc or other grants that I could apply. I did not want to change my research field again but wanted to keep researching on something related to chloroplast biology. It took a while, but I finally got a position with Doctor Marjorie Lundgren at Lancaster University. There, I was engineering C2 photosynthesis which is a rare type of photosynthesis but very interesting. We think that the plants with engineered C2 photosynthesis will do better in arid and warmer environments which might offer one solution to address climate change related challenges.
You said before that you changed topic when you came to UPSC?
I did my PhD in cold acclimation and tolerance to freezing temperatures. When doing a transcriptomic analysis, I found that a lot of genes coding for chloroplast proteins were changed. By then, I realised that chloroplasts play an important role during cold acclimation, and I got very interested in it. When I got the chance to join the Early Career Plant Scientist Symposium in 2015 in Umeå, I contacted Åsa who is working with chloroplast development and signalling. I was already reading some of her publications for my PhD thesis and got curious about her research. Then, she offered me a postdoc project and I thought that was a good chance to move into another research area.
Tamara Hernandez Verdeja still has a lot of questions around chloroplast development and will continue to work on this topic (photo: Oxel Urra).
Why did you decide to continue in academic research?
I have been lucky to find interesting projects that motivated my curiosity and good mentors and opportunities. But my main driver to stay in Academia is curiosity. I have a lot of questions about chloroplast development and there are many things that we do not know yet. For example, how do some species develop abundant chloroplasts in bundle sheath cells and others not which is the main characteristic of C2 photosynthesis? There is a lot of signalling going on that we do not know about yet and I find that very interesting. So, right now the chloroplasts are keeping my curiosity alive, and I am lucky that I can follow that curiosity.
What experiences did you gain during your time at UPSC and how did it affect your career?
It was good for my career. I gained lots of skills at different levels that have helped me to first get my position at Lancaster University and then also the Ramón y Cajal fellowship. I started to work in chloroplast research which opened a whole new field for me. I also wrote publications from start to end, started to review manuscripts and published my first corresponding paper which was a huge change on my CV and helped me to get the Ramón y Cajal fellowship. I also supervised a Master student, Michelle Schneider, that recently defended his PhD in Gent. This was really a good experience. Besides these skills that you need for an academic career, I got a lot of opportunities for outreach which I enjoyed a lot. When I moved to Lancaster University, I was looking for such opportunities and ended up organising public events for plant research outreach which was a lot of fun. I even considered to move into this direction in case I could not continue in academia.
Do you have a favourite memory of your time at UPSC that you would like to share?
I have many good memories UPSC. I really enjoyed the environment with people coming from so many different places. This created a nice environment and made it possible to find people with similar interests or start a group to do things together. Especially the after-work activities we were organising, like the Friday movie night or the Halloween parties in the UPSC “fikarum” (lunchroom), I enjoyed a lot. And I have one special memory of being in the greenhouse in the winter, probably January or February. It was late, there were not many people around and it was dark and snowing outside. I could see the trees covered in snow, and more snow falling. It was very nice and calm. Sometimes, I kind of miss the snow.
After completing her PhD in Genetics at the Complutense University of Madrid, Tamara Hernández-Verdeja joined UPSC in October 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher in Åsa Strand’s group. She spent five years there working on chloroplast development and signalling between chloroplasts and other plant cell compartments. In 2021, she moved Lancaster University in the UK to join Marjorie Lundgren’s, where she studied a special type of photosynthesis called C2 photosynthesis. Since March 2025, Tamara Hernández-Verdeja has been working as Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics in Madrid, Spain, continuing her research on chloroplast signalling and development.
For more information, please contact:
Tamara Hernández-Verdeja
Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics, CBGP (INIA/CSIC, UPM) Campus Montegancedo UPM, Madrid, Spain
E-mail:
Bluesky: @tamara-hverdeja.bsky.social
This interview is the first one in a newly launched series highlighting the career paths from UPSC alumni.