Elisa de Castro Álvarez graduated in Pharmacy in 2002 at the University of Salamanca, Spain. At the same university, she studied fundamental aspects of DNA replication and recombination in classical yeast models during her PhD. In 2010, she started her postdoctoral research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, where she studied the role of innate immunity in HIV infection.

From 2016 until 2022, she was editor of the Journal of the International AIDS Society. Most recently, she joined the Geneva Centre for Inflammation Research at the University of Geneva as its scientific coordinator.