I was an undergraduate, and later a graduate student, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where I started a PhD in Biology in 1992. After quitting the academic world for a few years, I finished my PhD and went back to basic research in 1999 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. I entered the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2002 as a research fellow within the Ramón y Cajal program and was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the UPF in 2006 and Professor of Genetics in 2010. Since 2002 I have been leading a group researching on Evolutionary Genomics within the Evolutionary Biology Unit of the Department of Experimental and Heath Sciences of the UPF. Between 2013 and 2016, I was the director of that Department. Additionally, I was the director of the Population Genomics Node of the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics (INB) and joined the CRG (Center for Genomic Regulation) to take co-responsibility of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA, see https://ega-archive.org) in the context of a collaboration with the EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute).

 

In January 2016 I quitted all these responsibilities to start a second period out of academia, this time as a member of the Catalan Government. I served as Secretary for Universities and Research until July 2018. They were two and half intense years, but now I am back to my previous positions as a scientist.