People

Toni Gabaldón, Principal Investigator

ICREA Research professor, group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, and associate professor at the UPF. He lead the comparative genomics groups. Main research interests are in the fields of genomics and evolution with significant contributions to the understanding of how genes, pathways, biological organisms and communities evolve and perform their functions.

Cinta Pegueroles, Research Engineer

I am a biologist specialized in evolution, population genomics and bioinformatics. I am interested in understanding how genomes evolve, specifically focusing on adaptation on both coding and noncoding sequences.

Ester Saus, Research Assistant

My research is based on implementing new high-throughput sequencing strategies, specially in the transcriptomics field, to characterize fungal pathogens species, elucidate the secondary structure of RNAs, and to study the evolution of lncRNAs across related species.

Ewa Ksiezopolska, Predoctoral Researcher

Interested in the evolution of antifungal resistance.

Hrant Hovhannisyan, Predoctoral Researcher

The main goal of my PhD project is to shed light on host-pathogen interactions between humans and different Candida species and investigate mechanisms of pathogenicity emergence in hybrid yeasts using methods of comparative transcriptomics.

Irene Julca, Postdoctoral Researcher

My principal area of interest is plant evolution and my main project is focused on understanding the phylogenetic relationships of olive with other plant species. I am also working on other different projects which involve the comparative genomic analysis of different species of plants and insects.

Jesse Willis, Predoctoral Researcher

I am working on a few projects which primarily involve metagenomics, prediction of the secondary structure of long non-coding RNAs, and analyses of next generation sequencing data.

Marina Marcet-Houben, Research Engineer

I use phylogenomics and comparative genomics tools in order to study how different organisms have evolved. I am specially interested in fungal species and have worked on topics related to horizontal gene transfer, whole genome duplication and hybridization.

Rosa Fernández, Postdoctoral Researcher

My research focuses on understanding how animal life took shape in space and time through phylogenomics and comparative genomics. I’m particularly interested in (i) applying state-of-the-art phylogenomic methods to unravel recalcitrant relationships in the Metazoa Tree of Life, and (ii) understanding the nature and evolution of the gene repertoire in animal genomes.

Susana Iraola Guzmán, Research Assistant

Trained in Pharmacy and Molecular Biology. Interested in the study of genomics and cell mechanisms to understand different processes applied to fungal pathogens, human microbiome, and human Cancer.

Uciel Chorostecki, Postdoctoral Researcher

Interested in evolution of lncRNAs. My research is focused in the study of lncRNAs structures from different species.

Verónica Mixão, Predoctoral Researcher

Interested in fungal pathogens and their evolution. My research is focused on the study of hybridisation in several fungal clades and the possible relationship between these events and the emergence of new pathogens.

Manu Molina, Research Engineer

Web Bioinformatician currently developing and administrating our websites (Drupal, WordPress, VueJs), as well the databases (MySQL, MongoDB), learning and working with our pipelines (Python, Shell) and everything related with the IT inside the group (VM, Docker, Nextflow).

Miquel Àngel Schikora, Master Student