Maria S. Balda graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has received a Prize for young scientist (under 26) and a Fellowship from the Argentinean and Mexican Council to do her PhD with Marcelino Cereijido at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies, Mexico, where her passion for the cell-cell junctional complex started. Maria then obtained an Anna Fuller Postdoctoral Fellowship from Yale University, USA, to work with James Anderson. There she contributed to the identification of the sequence of the first tight junction protein, ZO-1, and continued the identification of signal transduction mechanisms that guide tight junction assembly and function. She then moved the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she collaborated with  Karl Matter to perform the first functional analysis of a tight junction transmembrane protein, occludin.  In 2000, Maria started as Group Leader at University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology. Maria has identified and characterised different types of novel tight junction proteins. Maria is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms through which cell-cell junctions are involved in health and disease.  Maria is applying this knowledge to develop therapeutic tools to reverse disease conditions such as proliferative or degenerative eye diseases and tumorigenesis.  Maria is a British Society for Cell Biology committee member, Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and associate editor of different Journals. Maria’s scientific publications have over 13000 citations; her research career is remarkable indicated by an h-index of 56.