Gerardo Jiménez graduated in biology from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1988. He performed his doctoral studies at the Leukaemia Research Fund in London and at the Department of Biochemistry of the Universitat de Barcelona, working on the structure and regulation of mammalian globin gene loci. After receiving his PhD degree in 1993, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cancer Research UK, both in Oxford and in London. Since then, his research interests have focused on the transcriptional and cell signaling mechanisms controlling gene expression, mainly using Drosophila as a model system. After his postdoctoral training, he moved to the Institut de Biologia Molecular de Barcelona-CSIC, where he is principal investigator since 2002. He joined ICREA in 2003.

Research interests

We are interested in the molecular mechanisms that control embryonic development. Our model system is the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, whose powerful genetic tools facilitate the identification and analysis of regulatory processes at molecular level. Most of our research focuses on mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and cell-to-cell signaling. Essentially all the molecules and pathways that we study have been widely conserved during evolution, making our results applicable to other animal species, including humans. (See also http://www.ibmb.csic.es/groups/gene-expression-and-signaling).