Sol María Pose Méndez

My doctoral studies (at the University of Santiago de Compostela) focused primarily on the field of “EvoDevo” (evolution and development), whose main objective was to reveal the ancestral condition of the cerebellum by studying its development in cartilaginous fish, the oldest living organisms with cerebellum. During my postdoctoral period, I focused on functional studies, initially working on the Wnt signaling pathway in the early development of a cnidarian (at the University of Miami). Subsequently, I worked on neuronal regeneration in the cerebellum of zebrafish at the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany). The main project in zebrafish involved analyzing the regeneration of Purkinje cells, providing a tool for future studies on neurodegenerative diseases affecting the cerebellum, such as cerebellar ataxia. The next project involved studying cerebellar regeneration in the anuran amphibian Xenopus laevis (at the Complutense University of Madrid), to analyze the regeneration mechanisms in this animal model from an evolutionary perspective (“EvoRego”, the study of regeneration throughout evolution). The main objective of this new line of research is to advance the understanding of the mechanisms involved in the evolutionary loss of the cerebellum’s regenerative capacity, through the comparative analysis of neuronal regeneration in different model species, as key points in evolution.