We have moved to Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona)!

This is the first week of our lab at the IRB. We are excited and eager to start working here and interacting with the new colleagues. The IRB is an independent, non-profit research centre with top research labs focused on basic and applied biomedical science. The institute is located at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB).

At the IRB there are strong research groups, both on Cancer Research and on Computational Biology, the two areas of our research. Interesting science going on at the IRB includes research on cancer stem cells, metastasis, cell division, development, genomic instability, network biology and molecular modelling. It is now more than 10 years since I started my lab at University Pompeu Fabra (UPF), at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB). It has been a great environment that has allowed me and my team to grow as scientists. I think that after 10 years it is a good time for a change, as a new environment and new interactions should foster new ideas.

From Dry to Humid Lab. During the last 10 years at the UPF I have run a purely computational lab. Although by training I am a biologist with wet lab experience –my PhD at the lab of Xavier Estivill was a wet lab project on molecular genetics of deafness– I was caught by the computational work I did during my postdoc at Christos Ouzounis’ and then Roderic Guigó’s labs, which I really enjoyed. When I started at the UPF I decided to focus my lab on the computational study of cancer from a genomics perspective. After 10 years doing purely computational work, we will now combine dry and wet lab research. So, really exciting times lie ahead for our lab.