Arcadi got a PhD in Biology at the UAB. After quitting academia for some time, he went back to research as a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. He entered the UPF in 2002 and joined ICREA in 2006. Between 2008-13 he was vice-director of the Institute for Evolutionary Biology, a joint UPF-CSIC initiative. Since 2010 he is Professor of Genetics at the UPF and leads a group on Evolutionary Genomics within the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences. He directed the Department between 2013 and 2016, a time during which he started a collaboration with the CRG, the EMBL-EBI and the BSC to co-direct the European Genome-Phenome Archive. In 2016 he left academy again to become Secretary for Universities and Research at the Generalitat de Catalunya. After a short sabbatical, he returned to all his previous appointments in January 2019. Since 2020 he also directs the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and its research center, the BarcelonaBeta Brain Research Center.

Life as we see it in our planet today has been shaped by many different biological processes during billions of years. These processes leave complex and fascinating signatures in our genomes in the form of differences between species, or between individuals of the same species. Studying these patterns of genome diversity we can infer what are the forces that affect living organisms, how and when they act and how do they affect such various things as biodiversity, ageing or the differential susceptibility of different people to complex disease. All this knowledge empowers us to control our future but, above all, it is fun to obtain.