Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona. His educational background includes a B.S. and a PhD in Biology from the University of Barcelona. Funded by grants from EMBO and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University (Canada). He has also performed short term research projects at the Joint Genome Institute, the University of Arkansas and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Iñaki has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, most of them in high impact journals, such as Cell, Science, eLife, and PNAS. He has lead several research projects, including 2 ERC grants. He is an EMBO member, F1000 Faculty member and serves in the editorial board of several journals. His current research interests include the origin of multicellular animals and the evolution of complex life forms.

Research interests

The lab is interested in understanding how multicellular animals emerged from their unicellular ancestors. To this aim we perform comparative genomic analyses between multicellular animals and their closest unicellular relatives to unravel the nature of the unicellular ancestor that gave rise to animals. We are also currently developing molecular techniques and transgenesis tools in the closest unicellular relatives to Metazoa. Finally, we are also interested in unravelling the hidden diversity among opisthokonts lineages using metabarcoding data.