Luis Serrano

Luis Serrano did his PhD at the CBM (Madrid, Spain) on Cell Biology. Then he spent 4 years in the laboratory of Prof. A.R. Fehrs (MRC, UK) working in protein folding. In 1993, he became Group Leader at the EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) working in Protein Folding and design. Ten years later, he was appointed head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme at the EMBL and he started to work on Systems Biology. By the end of 2006 he moved back to Spain to lead a programme working on Systems Biology, where he was appointed vice-director before finally becoming the CRG director on July 2011. His group is currently focused on Synthetic Biology, engineering and designing of biological systems. He is EMBO and RACEFyN member and received the Marie Curie Excellence Award. He has also been awarded with the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant and participates as Principal Investigators in many research projects financed both by the European Commission (through the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Competitiveness (as part of the Consolider and Plan Nacional programmes). In recent years he has won two prestigious grants from the European Research Council, an ERC Advanced Grant and ERC Proof of Concept grant. He is Professor of ICREA and has directed 14 PhD thesis. He has published more than 270 papers in international journals. He has always been very mindful about the importance of the successful transfer of scientific discoveries to the society. He was involved in the creation of one of the first Spanish Biotech. Companies (Diverdrugs) in 1999. He is also co-founder of Cellzome, EnVivo and TRISKEL. Some of his work has been commented in Spanish newspapers (El Pais, LaVanguardia, El Mundo...), in the radio and other journals like Newsweek.