I am Full Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. After my PhD in Biology from the Univ de Barcelona (1991), I did a postdoctoral stay at the DFCI-Harvard Medical School (Boston). In 1995, I moved to Paris as a postdoc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and in 1999 I got a permanent position at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now, Sorbonne University). In 2002, I joined the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (now, Medicine and Life Sciences) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where we study how spatiotemporally coordinated cell progenitor specification and differentiation occur during morphogenesis to construct a functional brain (https://pujadeslab.upf.edu/). 

I served in institutional positions, first as Academic Secretary and as Vice-Chair of the Department (2007—2015), as Delegate of the Rector for Research (2015—2017) and as Vicerector of Professorate and Vicerector of Talent Recruitment and Retaining Policy (2017—2021). Now, I am Vicerector of Research.

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 insights into: i) how tissue growth is intertwined with cell proliferation and differentiation; ii) how the heterogeneity of neural progenitors is generated; and iii) how progenitor pools contribute to the functional circuits.

We use the zebrafish embryo as a model system, which allows 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