Born in Girona. He studied Biology at the University of Barcelona, and Biochemistry at Edinburgh University, where he obtained a PhD in 1992 with the help of a fellowship from La Caixa/British Council. He then joined the Biology department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoc. In 1997 he moved to The Scripps Research Institute where he became assistant professor of Molecular Biology in 2001. In 2003 he joined ICREA, and became Principal Investigator at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, where he heads the Laboratory of Gene Translation. He is the founder of two biotechnology companies and has acted as Chief Scientific Officer of Omnia Molecular SL. (2010-2015). He is an elected member of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, and currently acts as secretary of its Biological Sciences section. He is also the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Life.

Our laboratory investigates the process of protein synthesis, its evolution, and its connections to human health. We are preoccupied by two fundamental questions: what are the functional limits of protein synthesis, and how is it regulated and integrated within the context of the cell. The laboratory is currently undergoing a thematic shift, stimulated by new results obtained by the group. We have reported that human transfer RNA genes are hotspots of mutations, which accumulate in certain cancers and in aging individuals. We believe that this observation possibly indicates a significant role of mutant transfer RNAs in the processes of tumorigenesis and loss of proteome quality during human aging. In the foreseeable future, the activities of the laboratory will be directed towards researching this hypothesis, and establishing the functional impact of mutant transfer RNAs in human disease and aging.