Carmen Álvarez-Lorenzo, director of the Institute of Materials at the University of Santiago de Compostela (iMATUS), has been elected a full member of the Royal National Academy of Pharmacy of Spain (RANFE). The election took place on March 26, during an extraordinary plenary session of the institution.
A Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Carmen Álvarez-Lorenzo is one of the most internationally recognized researchers in the field of nanomedicine and advanced drug delivery systems, areas in which her work has contributed to advancing new therapeutic strategies based on functional materials.
With her election, Professor Álvarez-Lorenzo takes over the medal previously held by Dr. María Teresa Miras Portugal, also from Galicia and a distinguished academic whose career set a benchmark for generations of researchers in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences.
A graduate and PhD in Pharmacy from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC)—both with Extraordinary Distinction—she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) between 1998 and 2001. She then joined USC as a Ramón y Cajal research fellow until 2006, launching a scientific career that has now placed her among the most influential researchers in pharmaceutical technology and materials science applied to health.
Her research lies at the intersection of pharmaceutical technology, biology, materials science, and medicine, with a special emphasis on the development of nanocarriers for drugs and genes, stimulus-responsive hydrogels, bioinspired drug delivery systems, and drug-device combinations.
Her scientific output is widely recognized internationally and includes more than 410 scientific articles, 44 book chapters, 20 patents, and over 500 conference presentations and contributions, in addition to co-editing two books. Her h-index is 87 (Google Scholar, November 2025), and she is ranked in the World Ranking Top 2% Highly Cited Researchers. Throughout her career, she has supervised 32 doctoral theses, with another 10 currently in progress.
In addition to her research and scientific leadership at iMATUS, Álvarez-Lorenzo is actively involved in the international scientific community. She serves on the editorial board of leading journals such as the Journal of Controlled Release and Carbohydrate Polymers, and is an editor of the International Journal of Pharmaceutics. She is also a member of the Expert Network of the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) and a full member of the Royal Academy of Pharmacy of Galicia and the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, she is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). In 2021, she received the Ángeles Alvariño Medal in recognition of her scientific career.
The election of Carmen Álvarez-Lorenzo as a full member of the Royal National Academy of Pharmacy represents a new recognition of her scientific career and the work developed from USC and iMATUS in the field of biomaterials and advanced technologies for health, consolidating the role of the institute as an international benchmark in research on materials applied to biomedicine.