Summary of research career and main scientific achievements 

I obtained my degree in Biology at the University of Barcelona (UB, Spain) in 2000. Despite having a major focus on plant ecophysiology, my research career has been strongly multidisciplinary. A good example of this is my PhD Thesis (May 2005) at the University of Lleida (UdL, Spain), where I applied carbon and oxygen isotopes to study drought responses of cereal crops and Mediterranean trees, and these studies served as a keystone for palaeoenvironmetal applications. These works have been a strong stimulus for the recent expansion in the use of stable isotopes in archaeobotany (see Fiorentino et al., 2015 for a recent review on that topic).

In June 2006, I moved to the Chair of Tree Physiology (Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg; UF, Germany), first granted by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government, later as a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow. During this period, I focused on the mechanisms of variability of stable isotopes in trees: determining the metabolic origin of respired CO2 from whole plant to ecosystem level, tracing the carbon and oxygen isotope signal from leaves to phloem and wood, and assessing the use of oxygen isotopes as integrated measures for transpiration in trees, combining experiments under controlled conditions with field data and modeling. The works performed during this period served to develop my focus on the scaling of plant physiological processes from the plant to the ecosystem level.

In 2009, I rejoined the UdL as a Ramón y Cajal researcher. During this period, my main scientific aim was the use of stable isotopes (carbon and oxygen) as integrative measures for plant water use and water use efficiency, moving across multiple spatial and temporal scales, from the leaf to the landscape, and from diel cycles to millennial changes. The publications from this period strengthened my international reputation in the field of stable isotopes, and allowed me to implement at UdL a new research line on the study of plant water uptake dynamics.

In June 2016, I moved to a new position as Associate Professor (non-tenured) in Plant Physiology at the Universidad de Concepción (UdeC, Chile). During this period, I focused my research on the implementation of new isotope facilities for the study of physiological variability in plant water relations, focusing on different model species with contrasting responses (filmy ferns, Antarctic plants, wild tomato, wheat and eucalyptus). I gained an internal grant from UdeC and a competitive National project (FONDECYT), and participated as co-researcher in a technological development project (FONDEF), and started ongoing collaborations with UdeC.

In March 2018, I moved back to Spain as an ARAID researcher at the Agrifood Research and Technology Center of Aragón (CITA). My current aim is to characterize plant water use, focusing on 1) the interaction between water and carbon balance at different scales, from the leaf mesophyll to the whole individual, and 2) intra- and multi-specific variation and geographic patterns in response to adaptive constrains. For this purpose, I plan to develop novel applications of stable isotopes, as integrated tracers of multiple physiological processes.