Lyen Castro

Born in Manila, Philippines in 1995. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Chemistry in 2017 at the University of the Philippines Diliman as a government scholar (DOST-STI Merit program). After graduating, she embarked on her career as a researcher, taking part in a nationwide drug discovery program focused on the screening of bioactive plant metabolites. This early project ignited her profound interest in mass spectrometry as a tool and its emerging environmental applications. In 2020, she was awarded a scholarship grant from the European Commission to study a joint masters degree program in Environmental Contamination and Toxicology in Belgium (Université de Liège) and Spain (Universidad del País Vasco). During her studies, she completed research internships at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research - UFZ (Leipzig, Germany), Plentzia Marine Station (Spain) and the NTNU Wildlife Toxicology lab (Trondheim, Norway). Her work spans several projects employing high resolution mass spectrometry to investigate organic and inorganic emerging contaminants in the aquatic environment and their accumulation in wildlife. She completed her master's degree in 2022, and her project on the biomonitoring of rare earth elements in marine bivalves in southern Norway received recognition as Best Thesis Project in the cohort.

As she joins IDAEA-CSIC in Barcelona as a La Caixa INPhINIT fellow, she aims to develop an effect-directed analysis approach for the prioritization of chemicals of emerging concern in urban groundwater, and study the natural attenuation processes in aquifers that may also affect their fate. She hopes to bring forward a novel method combining environmental chemometrics and zebrafish transcriptomics to monitor the chemical status of water bodies affected by pollution.