Vivek Malhotra is one of world’s leaders on protein secretion and cellular compartmentation. His work is focused on how cellular compartments are made and communicate with each other, and how cells duplicate their compartments during cell division. He has been studying these processes since the late 80s and is acknowledge world wide for his creativity and novel findings. He obtained his Ph.D from Oxford and was a postdoc at Stanford University. He was a professor at University of California San Diego for 18 years. He joined the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona as a coordinator of the Cell and Developmental Biology Programme and ICREA Research Professor.

We want to understand the mechanism by which eukaryotic cells model membranes to generate transport carriers based on their needs. For example, how bulky molecules such as the collagens are secreted, how mucins are secreted in a regulated manner, and how transport carriers form at the Golgi. Protein such as TANGO's, PIMS and PKD are helping us resolve this issue. We have uncovered a new pathway by which cells secrete proteins that cannot enter the ER-Golgi pathway of secretion. We hope this will help us understand the mechanism by which cells release various cytokines, growth and angiogenic factors in a signal dependent manner. Finally we are interested in the mechanism by which Golgi complex is built during repeated cycles of cell-division.