Dr. Tamara Gómez Dacoba is a Research Associate in the Soft Matter Nanotechnology laboratory, funded by a Gipuzkoa Fellows grant. She is currently working on engineering the surface properties of nanoparticles to enable the in vivo generation of CAR T cells.

She holds a PhD in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Technology from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. She completed her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Prof. María José Alonso, developing polymer-based nanoparticles to modulate the immune system for applications in HIV vaccination and cancer immunotherapy, supported by a competitive FPU grant.

In 2018, she conducted a research stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working on new therapeutic strategies for brain tumors. Dr. Dacoba graduated cum laude in 2020, and she returned to MIT as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Paula Hammond through a project funded by the Gates Foundation. Her postdoctoral research focused on developing drug delivery systems to target hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in vivo for genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia. She also investigated bio-nano interactions, with a particular emphasis on the biomolecular corona. During this period, she served as co-instructor of the course Drug Delivery for Human Disease in the Department of Biology at MIT.

She is co-author of 14 publications in journals such as Advanced Functional Materials or ACS Nano and co-inventor of one patent. She has delivered three invited talks and seven selected oral presentations at international conferences, receiving several presentation awards. In 2021, she received the First Award for Research on HIV and Other STDs from the Xunta de Galicia for her work developing an HIV vaccine. Dr. Dacoba was named a 2024 Rising Star in Engineering in Health by the Departments of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, Cornell University, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University.