Dr. Margalida Coll Andreu presented her doctoral thesis in 1990, under the mentorship of Dr. Ignacio Morgado Bernal. Since 1992 she has been a tenured professor of Psychobiology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Throughout all these years, she has combined intense undergraduate and master's teaching activity with research. She has participated in multiple projects financed by the Spanish government and by the AGAUR (Generalitat de Catalunya), under the coordination of professors Ignacio Morgado, Margarita Martí and Isabel Portell. She is currently the coordinator of SGR2017-1026 group (Generalitat de Catalunya). Since its foundation in 2003, she belongs to the Institute of Neurosciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her research work has focused on the neurobiology of learning and memory modulation, both in healthy animals and in animals with various types of brain damage. Specifically, Dr. Coll has investigated the role of paradoxical sleep, stress, post-training administration of the hormone adrenaline and electrical stimulation, as well as injury, of various regions of the brainstem and thalamo-cortical arousal systems (such as the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus or the reticular thalamic nucleus). In recent years, her research work has focused on the study of the beneficial effects of physical exercise on cognitive processes, first in healthy animals and more recently in an animal model of traumatic brain injury. The results of the latter, conducted in animals with cognitive deficits caused by brain trauma, have shown that physical exercise may be beneficial in reducing the long-term memory deficits associated to injury, but the magnitude of the benefits observed, as well as the neural mechanisms involved in the facilitating effect may vary depending on the specific parameters of exercise, such as the time of onset after the injury, the duration of the intervention, the daily amount of exercise, the exercise intensity, or the concomitant intervention with a pharmacological agent (citicoline). The research group has found that animals with traumatic brain damage treated with physical exercise show an increase in neurogenesis in the hippocampus, and in the levels of neurotrophins (mainly BDNF) in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, in some of the exercise schedules the increase in neurogenesis and BDNF is associated with an improvement in long-term memory. The group has also shown that exercise has neuroprotective effects (decreasing neuronal death) and reduces chronic microglial reactivity in various brain regions. Recently, the research team has begun to carry out studies with patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury in collaboration with various rehabilitation centers, in order to study the potential of exercise to promote the cognitive rehabilitation of the patients. Most of the results obtained in these works have been presented at international scientific meetings in the field of neuroscience, and have been published in prestigious international journals, such as the Journal of Neurotrauma, Experimental Neurology, Behavioural Brain Research, or Behavioral Neuroscience. They have also led to final master's degree and doctoral theses.

Number of sexenis d'investigació: 4

Date of concession of the last sexeni: 01/01/2013

Publications in the first quartile: 4

Number of doctoral theses since 2010: 1 (and one ongoing)

Total citations: 271

Mean citationsH index: 10 (Scopus)