Carola Garcia de Vinuesa (born 1969) is a Spanish doctor, scientist, and professor. She is Royal Society Wolfson Fellow and Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra. She is a winner of the Australian Science Minister's Prize for Life Scientist of the Year and the Gottschalk Medal. Education and career Vinuesa obtained a Bachelor of Medicine at the Autonomous University of Madrid. While she was a student, she worked in a leprosy clinic in Kolkata on the shores of the Ganges, and helped train health workers in Ghana in rural areas. She said that Ghanan children were overwhelmingly admitted for unpreventable meningitis, leading her to believe that her time would be better spent learning the cause of the deadly disease, to develop preventative measures. She moved to the United Kingdom (UK) to do clinical training and doctoral research investigating the biological mechanisms of meningitis. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Immunology by the University of Birmingham in 2000. She received a Wellcome Trust International Travelling Fellowship in 2001 to undertake postdoctoral research at The John Curtin School for Medical Research at the Australian National University. In 2005, she discovered a genetic variant in mice that led to an auto-immune disease. In 2014, Vinuesa was awarded a grant, and that April, opened The Centre for Personalised Immunology at ANU. She was one of the first people in Australia to use genomic sequencing to link diseases to genetic variation. In 2015, she was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In October 2020, she became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. In September 2021, the Lupus Research Alliance granted one of two of its $3 Million Global Team Science Awards to Vinuesa's team, led by Dr. Virginia Pascual, to examine why lupus differs from patient to patient. In 2022, Vinuesa relocated to the UK to take a new position at Francis Crick Institute. CALM2 Variant and the Kathleen Folbigg Case (2018-present) In August 2018, Vinuesa received a phone call from a former student who was concerned that Kathleen Folbigg may have been wrongfully convicted of infanticide. The student told her that the medical evidence presented at trial didn't "sit right" with several medical and legal experts, and thought Vinuesa's expertise in immunogenetics may help uncover an underlying