Garants

This web-page includes information about the garants supporting the IPTC’s application for Excellence Unit María de Maeztu.

María Jesús Ledesma Carbayo

María Jesús Ledesma Carbayo is a Full Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and an affiliated scientist at the Centre for Biomedical Research Network (CIBER-BBN). A leading figure in Biomedical Engineering, her research focuses on developing advanced biomedical image processing and analysis techniques, with a strong emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for healthcare applications. Her work aims to improve diagnostics, prognostics, and treatment guidance across various medical fields, including cardiology, oncology, and ophthalmology.  

Professor Ledesma Carbayo has a distinguished international profile, including postdoctoral training at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) supported by a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. Her research has generated highly cited publications on topics like cardiac motion estimation, AI for glaucoma classification, lung disease analysis, and predicting cancer immunotherapy response.  

Demonstrating significant leadership, she has coordinated UPM’s participation in major international projects (e.g., EU FP7, EIT Health Catalyst Europe) and serves as an expert evaluator for top funding bodies like the European Research Council (ERC). Her innovative work translates into tangible impact through exploited international patents (licensed to companies like Imbio LLC and Leuko Labs Inc.) and the co-founding of the AI diagnostics spin-off, Spotlab SL.

Her contributions have been recognized with awards such as the highly competitive Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation (2019). Professor Ledesma Carbayo actively mentors the next generation, having supervised numerous PhD theses , and contributes to global health initiatives through collaborations with NGOs. Her work consistently bridges cutting-edge engineering with real-world clinical needs and societal benefit.

María Luisa López Vallejo

The envisaged mission was to grow as a strategic R+D unit in ICT, capable of addressing major scientific and technological challenges, by looking at the problems with a different, multidisciplinary and disruptive view, and prepared to cooperate in a complex environment with other strong R+D actors, and offering multidisciplinary services with a high economic and social value.

The Center, by gathering the skills and experience of researchers and teams in a variety of ICT areas, will have as the main objective to improve radically the position of UPM as an institution facing the new challenges of research, innovation and education which are being posed by the emerging ICT technologies and services.