Dr. Paula Menero Valdés

Dr. Paula Menero-Valdés is a researcher at the National Measurement Laboratory (NML) at LGC, working within the Inorganic Analysis Team. She earned her PhD in Analytical Chemistry cum laude from the University of Oviedo (Spain) in 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Rosario Pereiro and Dr. Beatriz Fernández. Her doctoral research focused on the use of metallic nanoclusters as elemental tags for mass spectrometric studies of proteins associated with ocular neurodegenerative diseases, in collaboration with clinicians at the Fernández-Vega Ophthalmological Institute (Oviedo, Spain). During her PhD, she carried out a research stay in Division 1.1 at BAM (Berlin) with Dr. Björn Meermann, where she began exploring ICP-ToF-MS for single-cell population studies. In September 2024 she joined the NML, her research addresses metrological challenges in imaging LA-ICP-MS and single-cell ICP-MS, with an emphasis on pushing the limits of quantification in biological systems. Her work has been presented at numerous international conferences, and she has co-chaired a session at the SciX conference (USA). She received the 2024 SAS Atomic Student Award and has authored over ten publications in leading Q1 journals. In addition, she is actively engaged in science outreach, giving lectures to school students and organizing the II PhD Multichemical Congress (Gijón, Spain, 2024).