Lilia Espada stud­ied bio­logy at the Uni­ver­sity of Lis­bon. She then did her PhD in Bio­medi­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Bar­celona where she developed pro­jects in the area of cell sig­nalling and reg­u­la­tion of apop­tosis in neur­onal cells.  After sev­eral pub­lic­a­tions and suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of her dis­ser­ta­tion she joined a pro­ject within the Har­vard Med­ical School-Por­tugal pro­gram, as post-doc­toral researcher. The pro­ject, with a focus on intra­cel­lu­lar traf­fick­ing in the con­text of dis­ease, was done mostly at CEDOC/NOVA Med­ical School in Lis­bon and included a period as vis­it­ing researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hos­pital, Boston. After work­ing in Por­tugal, Spain and the USA, she moved to Ger­many where she joined the Leib­niz Insti­tute on Aging/FLI in Jena, research­ing on the effects of late-life met­formin admin­is­tra­tion on sur­vival and lifespan. Both her pro­jects as postdoc­toral researcher res­ul­ted in high impact journ­als publications.

Lilia Espada joined ISAR Bioscience in 2021 and is since 2023 co-dir­ector of the stem cell plat­form with a spe­cial focus on dif­fer­en­ti­ation and mod­el­ling of hiPSCs-derived macrophages.