Laura Orellana studied medicine and biochemistry, and graduated with a PhD in Physics from the University of Barcelona in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Modesto Orozco. She moved to Sweden for her postdoctoral training at the Computational and Theoretical Biophysics Group, led by Prof. Erik Lindahl, at ScilLifeLab and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). She has developed coarse-grained methods to explore conformational changes in proteins, often in combination with molecular dynamics and experiments. Her work on the EGFR oncogene led to the first study in which a computational prediction was validated not only with structural data and in vitro assays but also in animal models—bridging in silico and in vivo levels. She has published in journals like PNAS, Nature Communications or Cancer Cell, and has authored a reference review on protein dynamics and simulations, which is among the top most cited papers in Frontiers. In 2020 she won a prestigious Karolinska Faculty Position Award, followed by the Junior Investigator Award by the Swedish Cancer Society, together with starting grants from the Swedish Research Council and multiple private foundations. Since 2021 she leads the Protein Dynamics and Mutation Lab at Karolinska Institute, Sweden, focused on the interplay between protein dynamics, evolution and pathogenic mutations, specially in cancer.

Apart from science, Dr. Orellana is a life-long autodidactic painter, briefly trained at the Swedish Academy of Realist Art. She merges surreal and scientific themes in her art: https://lorellana.faso.com/