Salvador Ventura is Chair Professor at the Dep. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Director of the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine and leader of the Protein Folding and Conformational Diseases group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He has authored more than 170 research and review papers, apart from several books and patents; pronounced around 100 invited conferences in national and international meetings and supervised over 40 research grants from public and private institutions. He got his Ph. D. in Biology at the UAB in 1998 and was a postdoctoral fellow at EMBL-Heidelberg. He has been researcher at Harvard Medical School (USA) and Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), among other international centres. He re-joined UAB as a “Ramon y Cajal” researcher in 2003. Dr. Ventura has received the UAB Excellence Research Award (2008) and the ICREA Academia (2009 & 2015).

Research interests

The long-term goal of our research is to contribute to decipher the mechanisms of protein homeostasis in the cell. We use a multidisciplinary approach to address fundamental aspects of protein folding, misfolding and aggregation. In addition to define the basic mechanistic principles underlying these processes, we aim to understand how their deregulation leads to the onset of a series of human conformational disorders, which include neurodegenerative diseases, but also diabetes or cancer. This knowledge should ultimately pave the way for the development of novel therapeutic strategies to target these devastating pathologies.

Keywords

Protein folding, Protein Aggregation, Amyloid, Protein Design, Conformational Disorders, Prions