Mónica
Arias Colinas

Mónica Arias-Colinas is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing of the University of Navarra. She holds a Nursing degree (2000) from the University of Navarra (UNAV) and a Master's degree in Intensive Care at the University of Glasgow (2002). She obtained her PhD in the Applied Medicine and Biomedicine programme at the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAV (2022) with a doctoral thesis entitled: ‘Investigation of inflammation and cardiovascular autonomic dysfunction after a bacterial infection: an exploratory longitudinal comparative study’. Her teaching and research career includes 15 years as a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Nursing at Bournemouth University in the UK. She also completed a research fellowship at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, Dorset. More recently, Mónica Arias-Colinas worked at the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health of the University of Navarra for 4 years. During this time she collaborated in major international projects on the Mediterranean Diet. Among these projects is the Predimed Plus Project, a multicentre, randomised, nutritional clinical trial for the primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. This project has been selected by the scientific journal Nature Medicine as one of the 11 most important clinical trials of 2023 for the international scientific community. The collaboration in this project marked a ‘before and after’ in Mónica Arias-Colinas' research career as it cultivated her interest in healthy lifestyles and chronic disease prevention. This is the axis and epicenter of her current teaching and research activity and Mónica Arias-Colinas collaborates in research projects with this focus. One of the projects in which she collaborates is the SENDO project whose objective is to analyze the effect of diet and lifestyles on the health of children and adolescents. She also participates in the SANTÉ project (Sustainable and Affordable Nutrition for a Transformative Empowerment) which aims to reduce the prevalence of child malnutrition through transformative empowerment in developing countries.She is also a researcher in the ‘Research in Nursing Care’ group of the Navarra Health Research Institute (IDIsNA) and in the UNAV group ‘Innovation for the Promotion of Family and Community Health’. In addition, Mónica Arias-Colinas teaches ‘Nutrition and Diet’ and ‘Nursing Care for Adults II’ in the Nursing Degree at the UNAV.