Gemma Moncunill holds a PhD in Immunology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She trained at leading international institutions such as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). She has developed her career as an independent researcher at ISGlobal, where her work has focused on understanding how the immune system responds to vaccines and infections. She will now maintain a dual affiliation between ISGlobal and the CaixaResearch Institute.

She has led international studies on malaria and COVID-19 to identify markers that predict vaccine efficacy and to understand the mechanisms that generate protection. Her research has shown that the immune state prior to vaccination determines both the response and the level of protection achieved, key knowledge for the development of more effective vaccines.

Dr Moncunill is currently advancing new lines of research aimed at improving the efficacy and durability of vaccines, particularly in vulnerable populations, and at studying how infections modulate the immune system. In this context, she is involved in a project focused on understanding why vaccines provide strong and long-lasting protection in some children but not in others. Specifically, she is investigating how different cell types and states of immune activation, both at the time of receiving the malaria vaccine and afterwards, affect the response, efficacy and durability of protection. She will also study how exposure to malaria and other factors such as age may alter these responses and, consequently, the ability to maintain long-term protection. In these studies, she will apply cutting-edge technologies that enable both single-cell and system-level analyses, using advanced computational models. Through her research, she aims to contribute to a future in which vaccines are more equitable, longer-lasting and better adapted to global health challenges.

She has published more than one hundred scientific articles in leading international journals such as The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Science Translational Medicine and Nature Communications. Among her most notable contributions are the study of immunological correlates of protection for the RTS,S malaria vaccine and the identification of immune signatures associated with responses to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.