People

  • Current members

    Mar obtained her PhD at the University of Barcelona in 1997 and a Master in Bioinformatics and Molecular Modeling at the University of London in 1999. She worked as a postdoc in the laboratories of John Hancock (Medical Research Council, UK), on the evolution of amino acid tandem repeats, and of Paul Kellam (University College London), on virus genomics. In 2002 she obtained a tenure-track position at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona) and in 2005 she was appointed ICREA Research Professor at Fundacio IMIM and continues to teach at UPF. She currently leads the Evolutionary Genomics group at GRIB (IMIM-UPF).
    List of publications at
    Google Scholar.



    José Carlos gratuated in Biochemistry at Universitat de les Illes Balears in 2015. After his BSc he did a MSc of Molecular Biotechonology at the Universitat de Barcelona (2016) and a second MSc of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (2019). He began his PhD in 2019 and now he is interested in studying the evolutionary relationships between de novo and duplicated genes.



    Born in Hamburg, Germany. I am conducting my doctorate under the supervision of Mar Albà and Jana Selent within the field of cancer immunotherapy. At the same time as my PhD, I study my second master in Bioinformatics at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. My Bachelor of Science in Biomedicine and first Master of Science in Public Health built my scientific foundation in biomedical science and taught me how to conduct interdisciplinary research.

    Outside the Lab

    If not in room 486 in the PRBB, you can probably find me playing volleyball, in the gym or having a Vermouth with friends in Grácia. The weekends I mostly spend on some mountains in Cataluña and I am always up for new hiking recommendations! I am fluent in German and English but you can also contact me in Spanish or French. So far, my Catalan reaches from «clar que si» to «com més serem, més riurem». I am working on it!



    Marta Espinosa graduated in Genetics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2020. After that, she started a MSc in Bioinformatics for Health Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is mostly interested in Genomics and Cancer. Currently, she is doing her Master Thesis Project in the IMIM working on the identification of novel classes of neoantigens in cancer, in Dra. Albà's group.



    Sergio graduated in Computer Science at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2021. For a couple of years, he worked as both Data Scientist and Software Engineer until he decided to start a MSc in Data Science at the Barcelona School of Economics. After he finished his graduate studies, he started working as a Data Scientist in the development of novel transcriptome-informed methods to predict the response to immunotherapy in cancer project.



    I studied biology in Greece and continued with my Master in “In silico Drug Design” at the University of Paris. I conducted my PhD at Paris Saclay University where I studied the genetic and molecular novelty harboring in the noncoding regions of the yeast genomes. Always interested in the fundamental and exciting question of how new genes emerge and how genomes evolve with the time, I am actually conducting my postdoctoral research on comparative genomics of the yeast population.   Keywords : de novo genes, transcriptomics, ribosome profiling, noncoding genome



    Covadonga did her Ph.D. in Cell Biology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2015-2020), where she developed her thesis on chromatin remodeling during mouse spermatogenesis, focusing on the evolutionary and functional implications of the 3D disposition of the nuclear genome structure. In 2020 she joined the Hereditary Cancer group at IDIBELL (Spain) to study the molecular role of MLH1 epimutations in Lynch Syndrome patients and in 2022 she joined the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at the University of Edinburgh (UK) to develop a project focusing on characterizing meiotic chromatin loops. Covadonga is interested in mammalian evolution, epigenomics, population genetics, and genome structure and function. She joined the lab in early 2023 and is currently developing a project on comparative genomics in higher primates.



  • Former members

    past members
     

  • Picture gallery

    pictures