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Julia Guiomar Niso Galán

Guiomar Niso is a tenured scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Head of the Neuroimaging Group at the Cajal Neuroscience Center (CNC-CSIC) and Vice President of the Young Academy of Spain. She investigates human neurophysiology to characterize brain dynamics in health and disease, aiming to improve people’s lives through better clinical applications.

She graduated in Telecommunications Engineering with Honors from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM, 2008), where she also completed an MSc in Bioengineering and Telemedicine (2009) and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering with European Mention (2013), funded by a competitive national FPU Fellowship and including research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. From 2013 to 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University. In 2017 she returned to Spain with an international AXA Postdoctoral Fellowship, the first ever awarded at UPM; she obtained the I3 research excellence certification in 2020 and was Senior Researcher at Indiana University (2021–2023). In 2023 she joined the Cajal Institute (CSIC) as Principal Investigator with a Ramón y Cajal fellowship and, one year later, obtained a tenured position.

Dr. Niso has led multiple open science initiatives: open data repositories (the Open MEG Archive, OMEGA), open software (Brainlife, Brainstorm, HERMES) and open standards (the Brain Imaging Data Structure, BIDS), to foster reproducibility and transparency in neuroscience. She chaired the first elected BIDS Steering Group (2019–2023) and serves on the steering committees of NiPreps and NeuroJSON. Since 2025 she has been Vice Chair of the EU COST Action INDoS (Improving Neuroimaging Data for Sharing) and Spain’s representative in the COST Action EEG101 (Fundamentals of Open & Rigorous EEG Science).

Her work has been recognised with the Medal for Young Researchers of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain (2023), the International Open Science Prize of The Neuro and the Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation awarded to the BIDS Steering Group (2023), the British Neuroscience Association Team Credibility Prize awarded to #EEGManyLabs (2023), the Young Ada Byron Award for Women Technologists (2022) and her election to the Young Academy of Spain (2022).

Neuroimaging Group: group website · group at CNC-CSIC