Arcadi Navarro, currently in charge of the Health and Life Sciences Academic Coordination Unit and director of the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS), has been appointed Secretary for Universities and Research of the Generalitat (Catalan Government) within the framework of the appointments that took place yesterday by the Catalan Government.

Arcadi Navarro thus takes over the Universities and Research Secretariat, which together with the Business and Competitiveness Secretariat and the General Secretariat form the Department of Business and Knowledge, whose structure has been approved by a decree.

In the exercise of his office, Arcadi Navarro will be responsible for matters relating to universities, the quality of the university system, the promotion of research and the grants that are not the competence of the Department of Education.

This Secretariat will be responsible for the planning, management and implementation of government policies in these areas. As affiliated entities, he will have the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU Catalonia) and the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR).

Arcadi Navarro i Cuartiellas (Sabadell, 1969) has a degree in Biology and a PhD in Genetics (1998) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 1999 he did a postdoctoral stage at the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), where he worked on population genetics.

He joined Pompeu Fabra University in 2002 as a research fellow on a Ramon y Cajal programme and in 2006 became an ICREA research professor. In 2010 he became a full professor of Genetics.

He was deputy director of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) between 2008 and 2013 and since 2013 he has been head of the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, which in October 2015 received Maria de Maeztu accreditation for excellence. In this department he coordinated the Programme in Evolutionary Biology and Complex Systems (2009-2013).

He currently heads the Evolutionary Genomics Lab at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE, CSIC-UPF) and his research interests include genome evolution, computational genomics, the diversity of the human genome and the genomic architecture of complex traits.

Arcadi Navarro is the director of Genomic Diversity and Population Genomics Node of the National Bioinformatics Institute and secretary of the board of the Association Bioinformatics Barcelona BIB.

Since 2013 he has collaborated with the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in carrying out studies that link genotypes to phenotypes. This research centre leads the EGA@Barcelona team, the installation in the Catalan capital of the database of the European Genome-phenome Archive.