Lydia Alvarez-Erviti studied pharmacy and obtained her PhD at the University of Navarra (2002). Following an MSc program, she returned to laboratory research as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Movement Disorders (CIMA). She was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship and conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford. In 2009, she returned to the Department of Clinical Neuroscience (UCL) as a senior post-doctoral fellow. She was awarded a Parkinson's UK Senior Research Fellowship to develop the use of exosomes to deliver therapy for PD patients.

In 2014, she moved to the Center for Biomedical Research of La Rioja (CIBIR) to establish a new research program on PD. Two years later she was awarded with a Miguel Servet Senior Fellowship to investigate pathological mechanisms in PD and the role of alpha-synuclein in pathology