Salvador Ventura is Full Prof. at the Dep. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and leader of the Protein Folding and Conformational Diseases group at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB), Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He has been director of the IBB in 2017-20. Dr. Ventura has authored more than 240 peer-reviewed research and review papers, apart from several book chapters and 13 patents. He got his Ph. D. in Biology at the UAB in 1998 and worked as postdoctoral fellow (1999-2002) at EMBL-Heidelberg. He has been researcher at Harvard Medical School (USA) and Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) among other centres. He rejoined UAB as a Ramon y Cajal researcher in 2003. Dr. Ventura received the UAB 2008 Excellence Research Award, the Bruker Prize "Manuel Rico" 2020 from the Spanish Biophysical Society and 2009, 2015 and 2020 ICREA-Academia Awards in Life Sciences and Medicine.

Research interests

Our lab uses 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 human conformational diseases and to develop innovative therapeutics to target these pathologies. Moreover, this knowledge should allow us to design and produce novel and better protein-based biopharmaceuticals as well as the development of new self-assembled materials for nanotechnology applications.

Keywords

Protein folding, Protein Aggregation, Amyloid, Protein Design, Protein Self-Assembly, Prions, Conformational Disorders