Arcadi Navarro - Biography#

Prof. A. Navarro was an undergraduate, and later a graduate student, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he started a PhD in Biology in 1992. After quitting the academic world for a few years, he finished his PhD and went back to basic research in 1999 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He entered the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2002 as a research fellow within the Ramón y Cajal program and was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the UPF in 2006 and Professor of Genetics in 2010. Since 2002 he has been leading a group researching on Evolutionary Genomics within the Evolutionary Biology Unit of the Department of Experimental and Heath Sciences of the UPF. Between 2013 and 2015, he was the director of that Department.

Additionally, he was the director of the Population Genomics Node of the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics (INB). Finally, he joined the CRG (Center for Genomic Regulation) to take co-responsibility of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA, see http://ega.crg.eu) in the context of a collaboration with the EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute). In January 2016 he suspended all these responsibilities to start a period of service within the Catalan Government, having been appointed Secretary for Universities and Research.

Despite his numerous publications, Arcadi Navarro is devoted totally to the work in the lab, to his collaborators (both postdoctoral and doctoral students) and to his teaching to his undergraduate students. He has not special honors. He, however, has an essential role in the organization of research in the Autonomous Government of Catalonia. He is currently Secretary of State for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge, therefore the main responsible of research in Catalonia, a region with excellent universities (twelve), and research centers of the highest quality (especially in biomedicine, science and technology). All this makes the city of Barcelona (the capital of Catalonia) one of the leading European cities in high quality research in science and technology, and probably the best in the Mediterranean region. The activities of the Barcelona Knowledge Hub, which is proposing the candidate, depend on Prof. A. Navarro by the part of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia.