After four years of postdoctoral fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under the supervision of Carol Greider, the disciple of Margarita Salas, Maria Blasco returning to Spain in 1997 to join the National Center for Biotechnology, CSIC. There, Blasco intended to continue his research work that had enabled him to clone one of the telomerase genes and generated the first knockout mouse for this gene. Now in our country, it happened several works of broad impact on the development of animal models for studying the involvement of telomerase in cancer development and aging processes.

With this knowledge, Blasco and her team joined the newly formed National Cancer Research Center in 2003. This center acts as director of the Molecular Oncology Program and chief of Telomeres and Telomerase. In recent years, Blasco has received numerous awards for his research work as the anniversary FEBS prize, the Gold Medal and the EMBO Award “Carmen and Severo Ochoa”, among others. María Blasco has published hundreds of original works, many of them true touchstones in the field of the role of telomeres and telomerase in aging, and tumor development.