Dr. Mar Castellano is a well-recognized researcher in the fields of plant translation regulation and response to stress. Her work has contributed to the understanding of how plants adapt to environmental stresses and the role of translational regulation in this process. Regarding this latter issue, her group has recently identified a novel plant-specific translation regulator, which adapts translation to the changing metabolic and energy conditions imposed by the diel cycle (Toribio et al. Nature Plants, 2009). Apart from translation regulation, her work also focuses on the study of protein folding in plant development and response to stress. For this, her group has been actively analyzing the role of different co-chaperones in response to cellular and environmental stresses, such as endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and in response to heat. Nowadays, she is involved in the identification of the precise set of co-chaperones that mediate the folding (and, therefore, the activity) of master regulatory proteins involved in key plant developmental transitions and in plant adaptation to environmental conditions associated to global warming and climate change. From 2016, she has led 4 research projects as single principal researcher; one of them was a "Starting Grant" of the European Research Council (ERC).