I am Full Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). After my PhD in Biology from the Univ de Barcelona (1991), I did a postdoctoral stay at the DFCI-Harvard Medical School (Boston). Then, I moved to Paris first as a postdoc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), and then I got a permanent position at the Univ Pierre et Marie Curie. From that time, I have been fascinated by developmental neurobiology, and how you go from DNA and genes to the generation of form. This has been the main focus of my latest scientific career. In 2002, I had the opportunity of joining the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) at the UPF, where we work in trying to understand how spatiotemporally coordinated cell progenitor specification and differentiation occur during morphogenesis to construct a functional brain. I served first as Academic Secretary and then as Vice-Chair of the DCEXS, as VR of Professorate and currently as VR of Talent Recruitment and Retaining Policy.

Research interests

Our goal is to understand how spatiotemporally coordinated cell progenitor specification and differentiation occur during morphogenesis to construct a functional brain. While incorporating time as a missing-yet-crucial factor, we want to provide a global view of how cell fate decisions are taken in the brain and gain biological insight into: i) how tissue growth is intertwined with cell proliferation and differentiation; ii) how the heterogeneity of neural progenitors is generated; and iii) how individual progenitors behave during patterning and morphogenesis.

We use the zebrafish embryo as a model system, which allow us to combine cutting-edge complementary approaches such as: CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, high-resolution 4D-imaging paired with cell tracking tools, and analyses of gene regulatory landscapes. We would like to map the ontogeny of differentiated neurons, and to reveal the sequence of temporal transitions from progenitor to the differentiated state.

Keywords

developmental biology, neurobiology, segmentation, compartments, cell lineage, morphogenesis, progenitor cells, neurogenesis, cell specification, 4D-imaging, neuronal differentiation