My name is Marta Martínez and I’m from Valencia, Spain. I work as a senior researcher at the Food Proteins group in the Institute of Food Science research (CIAL), which belongs to the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). I’m a Chemical Engineer and hold a PhD on Food Science. My research interests are currently focused on understanding the effect of food structure and polysaccharide-protein interactions on the gastrointestinal digestion to design novel foods based on alternative proteins.

I have a unique expertise on the application of advanced structural characterization techniques, such as small angle scattering techniques, in the food science area. Along my career, I have applied scattering techniques, in combination with complementary methods such as X-ray diffraction, rheology, spectroscopy and microscopy, to characterize the multi-scale architecture of plant cell walls, polysaccharides extracted from a variety of biomass sources (e.g. seaweeds, microalgae, agroindustrial waste, etc.), food proteins and food packaging materials.

I’m joining Dr. Stein’s team for a few months to study the digestibility of seaweeds through in vivo experiments. We will then compare the results to those obtained through in vitro digestions and will investigate the nanostructures found in the digesta to correlate with the degree of intestinal absorption. I’m really excited to join the team for some time and hope to start new collaboration with the group!