Marta Shahbazi

On Wednesday 28 October 2026 Shahbazi was travelling on a Renfe AVE high-speed train to the 19th congress of the Spanish Society of Developmental Biology in El Rompido, Huelva, where she was due to receive the society's scientific excellence prize. Shortly before 9am, near Urda, south of Madrid, the train ran into the back of a stationary train operated by Iryo. More than 540 people were on the two trains and at least 69 were killed, making it Spain's worst rail crash since 2013. Reports said a control centre had taken over after a computer failure, and Spain's prime minister promised a full investigation. Another young Leonese scientist travelling to the same congress, Tamara González Costa, also died.

For several days her family had no news of her. Her death was confirmed on 31 October in a statement by CiMUS in Santiago de Compostela, and the LMB then said it was deeply saddened by the tragic death of an inspiring, talented and passionate scientist. Tributes also came from the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, whose director, Professor Bertie Gottgens, said its community was shocked and deeply saddened. Funeral arrangements had not been made public at the time of writing.

Marta Shahbazi Alonso came from the province of León in north western Spain, and Spanish press described her as a scientist of Leonese origin. Her aunt, María José Alonso, is a principal investigator at the CiMUS molecular medicine research centre of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Shahbazi completed her PhD at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid in 2013.

In 2014 Shahbazi moved to the University of Cambridge as a research associate in the laboratory of Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, where she worked on mammalian development around the time the embryo implants in the uterus. She was part of the team that developed a method to grow human embryos in the laboratory through the implantation stage, giving scientists a direct view of a period when the basic body plan forms.

In 2020 she joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a group leader in the Cell Biology Division, and she also held roles as an affiliate principal investigator and affiliate assistant professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Her group, working on cell fate decisions in the early mammalian embryo, studied how the right cell types arise at the right place and time, how tissue shape and cell identity influence each other, and how embryos can sometimes develop normally despite aneuploid cells, which are found in about 80 per cent of early human embryos. Using supernumerary embryos donated from fertility treatment under licence, the work aimed to explain why roughly 30 per cent of human pregnancies fail around implantation.

Her work was recognised with several awards, including selection for the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Young Investigator Programme. In 2026 the Spanish Society of Developmental Biology awarded her its José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta prize for outstanding contributions to the study of the early stages of human development.

Shahbazi lived in Cambridge, was married and had two young children. She wrote publicly about combining a demanding research career with family life and used the term "mother scientist" to describe herself. The LMB said she was a dedicated mentor to her students and trainees and a much-admired role model.

Shahbazi's research helped make the days around human implantation, long a black box in biology, something that could be studied directly in the laboratory. Her group's questions about cell fate, embryo shape and chromosome errors bear directly on infertility and early pregnancy loss. Colleagues remembered her as a generous mentor and as a visible example of a scientist raising a young family while leading a research group.