Dr. Berta Cillero Pastor was born in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She studied Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She obtained her PhD at the Rheumatology Division at the INIBIC Insitute of La Coruña on the effect of cytokines in chondrocyte mitochondrial proteins. She then moved to Amsterdam with her own fellowship to work at AMOLF where she used mass spectrometry imaging in the field of rheumatic pathologies.

Currently she is principal investigator and CORE lab leader at the Division of Imaging Mass Spectrometry at M4I. She supervises several PhD students that try to understand the molecular mechanisms that trigger different age-related diseases such as cardiovascular or orthopedic pathologies using spatially resolved mass spectrometry tools. In the past, she obtained funding from several European programs and NWO to develop new molecular imaging-based tools with applications such as the study of drug delivery systems for joint repair.

She is the Dutch representative of the COST COMULIS initiative on multimodal imaging, FEM ambassador, and chair at different initiatives related to mass spectrometry imaging technologies.

In the DARTBAC project she will be co-leading the work package 4, responsible for development and transfer of new MS and SPR based methodologies enabling a more fundamental understanding of biofilm formation.