Henar Vázquez Villa studied chemistry at Universidad de Oviedo where she received her PhD in Organic Chemistry under the guidance of Prof. José Barluenga and Prof. José Manuel González. Her doctoral work was focused on the development of new carbon-carbon bond forming reactions promoted by iodonium ions. During her doctoral studies she did an internship in the group of Prof. Scott Miller at Boston College (USA), where she worked on a project related to the use of amino acids and peptides as asymmetric organocatalysts.

In 2005 she joined the group of Prof. Erick Carreira at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH-Zürich) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she dealt with the design of novel enantiopure catalysts for the asymmetric transfer-hydrogenation of carbonyl compounds.

After her return to Spain, Henar worked at Universidad de Alcalá under the supervision of Prof. Julio Álvarez-Builla, developing new methodologies for the synthesis of bioactive compounds.

In December 2007 she joined the Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory led by Prof. María Luz López Rodríguez at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her current areas of interest are the development of chemical probes for the study of serotonin receptors, the identification of novel ligands for the lysophosphatidic acid receptor LPA1 and the design of inhibitors of the bacterial cell division protein FtsZ.