Since 2002, I have served as an ICREA Research Professor and Group Leader of the Structural Characterization of Macromolecular Assemblies group at IRB Barcelona, within the Mechanisms of Disease Programme. My academic background includes a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Salamanca University (1993) and a significant tenure at EMBL Heidelberg (1993–2002) as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Staff Scientist in Structural Biology.

Research Fields: Structural Biology, Computational Biology, Signaling

Current Research: Structural determination of protein complexes involved in splicing, transcription and signaling. Prediction of relapse in endometrial cancers using machine learning. TGF-β and SMAD Regulation in Pediatric Rare Diseases.

Our research aims to decipher the structural and molecular mechanisms that link cell signaling to gene expression using high-resolution structural biology. We investigate how these pathways are regulated and the subsequent implications of their dysregulation in human disease. Our work focuses on the SMAD family of transcription factors, where we have characterized the mechanisms that sequentially label these key components of the TGF-β pathway for activation and degradation. This effort provides a fundamental understanding of these molecular machines and establishes a structural basis for the design of small-molecule inhibitors specifically targeting disease-derived SMAD variants. Additionally, we are developing predictive models for relapse and metastasis in gynecological cancer patients.