RESEARCH
Laura Sudupe Medinilla, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where her research centers on transposable elements (TEs) and their role in injury and aging. She leads computational analysis of Visium HD spatial transcriptomics data to investigate transposable element activity in skeletal muscle injury, a project run in collaboration between the AI4BioMedicine Lab and the Environmental Epigenetics Lab.
Her broader expertise spans spatial and single-cell transcriptomics (GEX, CITE-seq, TCR/BCR-seq), computational pipeline development, and data analysis in Python and R/Bioconductor, with hands-on experience in Git, Nextflow, and high-performance and cloud computing environments.
During her PhD at KAUST — “Spatial Profiling in Translational Research” — she used spatial transcriptomics (Visium) to characterize the bone marrow microenvironment in multiple myeloma, uncovering cellular architecture and signaling patterns associated with disease progression, work presented at ASH and published in Blood and, more recently, in Communications Biology. She also contributed to a multidisciplinary study on the molecular activation of reparative cardiac fibroblasts after myocardial infarction, combining bulk, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics.

BIOGRAPHY
Laura’s path has taken her across Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Europe, shaping a collaborative mindset and adaptability to interdisciplinary teams. She carried out her doctoral research at KAUST (2021–2024), with a research stay at Navarrabiomed (Spain) and a visiting research period at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) in 2023. She defended her PhD thesis at KAUST, supervised by David Gómez-Cabrero, with a committee of Prof. Jasmeen Merzaban, Prof. Denis Schapiro, and Prof. Xin Gao.
After her PhD, she joined Immunai in Prague as a Computational Biologist (2025–2026), where she worked on single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data analysis, including a spatial pipeline (Xenium) developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca. In June 2026, she returned to KAUST as a Postdoctoral Researche