María-Jesús Pérez-Pérez received her Ph D in Pharmacy from the Complutense University in Madrid (UCM, ES). She performed a postdoctoral stay for two years and a half at Rega Institute for Medical Research (KULeuven, BE) financed by Fundación Areces and the former Marie Curie program. In 1995 she came back to the Nucleoside Group at IQM-CSIC as Tenured Ccientist. In 2005 she was promoted as Research Scientist and since 2011 she is Research Professor. In the period 2005-2011 she was Head of Department and from 2011 to 2015 she has been Director of the Instituto de Química Médica (IQM-CSIC).

Her research is mostly devoted to antiviral and antitumor chemotherapy from a medicinal chemistry perspective. She has been working in selective inhibitors against therapeutically-relevant nucleoside processing enzymes (thymidine phosphorylase, nucleoside kinases, etc..) as well in the identification and optimization of antivirals, particularly against HIV, enterovirus or alphavirus. Her currently active areas of research involve antivascular strategies against tumor growth and metastasis (angiogenesis and vascular disrupting agents) and compounds able to interfere with the replication of reemerging virus (i.e. Chikungunya).