José Fernández Martínez is a Spanish biomedical researcher focused on muscle biology in both physiological and pathological contexts. He completed his Bachelor's in Biochemistry (2017) and Master’s in Biotechnology (2019) at the University of Granada, Spain. During his Master’s, he joined Prof. Darío Acuña-Castroviejo’s lab, where he later pursued his Ph.D., funded by an FPU fellowship from the Spanish Government. His doctoral research investigated how chronodisruption, particularly alterations in Bmal1, affects muscle homeostasis, while exploring exercise and melatonin as potential therapeutic strategies for sarcopenia.

In 2021, Dr. Fernández Martínez conducted a research stay in Prof. Bert Blaauw’s group at the University of Padua, Italy, supported by an EMBO Scientific Exchange Grant, advancing key aspects of his Ph.D. research. After defending his Ph.D. in 2024, he joined Prof. Blaauw’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher.

His current project, SMECC (Skeletal Muscle-Endothelial Cell Crosstalk in muscle plasticity and disease), explores how changes in muscle mass affect endothelial cell protein homeostasis and vice versa, how endothelial alterations impact muscle physiology. Using advanced techniques and tissue-specific transgenic mouse models, he studies processes like atrophy, hypertrophy, and angiogenesis. His work is supported by the Ramón Areces Foundation fellowship and, more recently, by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the European Commission.