Dr. Maria Abad studies the interplay between stress responses and cellular plasticity. She discovered that cellular reprogramming is feasible in living organisms, and has contributed to the demonstration that tissue damage, through the induction of cellular senescence, creates a microenvironment critical for cellular reprogramming. More recently, Dr. Abad has studied the translation of small open reading frames (sORFs) located in assumed non-coding regions, and her group has identified several lncRNA-derived small proteins with important roles in cellular plasticity. At Altos Cambridge, she will aim to create a multidisciplinary and collaborative program to unravel how the proteome is shaped to cope with stress, and to identify novel cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic determinants of cellular reprograming and tissue rejuvenation.