Erika Pastrana has a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and was granted a doctorate at the same university, investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for promoting the regeneration of damaged axons in the mammalian central nervous system. After her doctoral thesis, Pastrana did postdoctoral studies at Columbia University, in New York, where she studied neurogenesis and neural lineage progression mechanisms in adult mice.

She began her publishing career in 2010 as editor at Nature Methods, where she was in charge of neurosciences, and in March 2014 she moved to the journal Nature Communications as team manager. In April 2017 she took on her current role as Editorial Director of the Nature Research Journals, being responsible for the management and editorial direction of Nature journals in health and applied sciences, including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods – among others. Pastrana is also responsible for the launch of new journals such as Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Computational Science and Nature Mental Health.

As part of the senior leadership team at Nature Portfolio, Erika works in collaboration with key partners externally and internally to develop new policies and practices that aim to improve editorial service and scientific communication in support of open science and reproducibility.