About me
Marina Pollán holds a degree in Medicine from the University of Salamanca and is a specialist in Preventive Medicine and Public Health. She also studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (Baltimore, USA) and the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), and received the Extraordinary Doctoral Prize for her dissertation on breast cancer from the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2023, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Granada.
The appointment of Pollán as director of the ISCIII positions her as the first director of the ISCIII to have spent her entire career within the organization, having joined in 1990. She has been a Research Professor at the National Center for Epidemiology (CNE-ISCIII) since 2016 and has served as Scientific Director of the Biomedical Research Consortium in Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP) since 2017. She was Director of the National Center for Epidemiology from February 2019 to October 2022, coordinating the center's work during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the Scientific Coordinator of the National Seroprevalence Study of SARS-CoV-2 Infection (ENE-COVID), which has received significant international recognition.
Her primary research focus has been on cancer risk factors, primarily modifiable factors associated with lifestyle habits, such as those related to breast cancer, but also those related to other common malignancies in Spain. As a researcher, she has published over 300 scientific articles (H-index=52) and has extensive teaching experience in cancer epidemiology and epidemiological methodology.
She has been part of the project evaluation coordination team at both the National Agency for Evaluation and Foresight (ANEP) and the Health Research Fund (FIS), and has participated in numerous national and international expert groups and scientific committees. Since 2021, she has coordinated the Predictive Medicine component of the IMPaCT project (Precision Medicine Infrastructure associated with Science and Technology), which aims to create, in collaboration with the Health Services of all the Autonomous Communities, a large national cohort based in Primary Care to serve as a research infrastructure in Spain.
