Arcadi Navarro

Professor of Genetics and INCREA Research at Universidad Pompeu Fabra (UPF). He is also currently the director of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and its research centre, the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center , and the co-director of the European Genome-phenome Archive as part of a collaboration between the Centro de Regulación Genómica (CRG) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He earned a PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and, after leaving the academic world for a time, returned to carry out basic research at Edinburgh University. He joined the UPF in 2002, where he leads a research group on comparative genomics and evolutionary medicine, areas in which she has written more than 180 publications, mainly with computational approaches, covering subjects ranging from chromosomic speciation or biodiversity to the biological roots of senescence or how to better predict phenotypes based on genomic data. He was the vice-director of the Instituto de Biología Evolutiva BE (IBE; UPF-CSIC) from its creation in 2008 to 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, he was the director of the UPF’s Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, during which period he received the María de Maeztu Prize (awarded by the Spanish Government to the best Spanish universities and research units). In addition, he was the director of the Nodo de Genómica de la Población del Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática (INB). In 2013 he joined the CRG as the co-director of the EGA as part of a collaboration with the European Informatics Institute. Today, EGA is the largest worldwide distributor and administrator of medical genomics data. Between 2016 and 2018, he was the Generalitat de Cataluña’s Secretary for Universities and Research. In 2019, he returned to her previous posts, joining the management of the BBRC, a research centre devoted to fighting Alzheimer’s and other age-related dementias, created by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.