Ben Lehner and Fyodor Kondrashov are two of the three young researchers selected in Spain. At the age of 31, both group leaders are outstanding scientists in their research fields.
 
Ben Lehner is the leader of the Genetic Systems research group at the EMBL/CRG Systems Biology Research Unit, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. This young English researcher is an ICREA Research Professor and was also awarded one of the prestigious grants of the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant).
 
His research is focused on basic questions in genetics. His group uses both experimental and computational approaches to understand and globally predict how mutations combine to cause disease, the evolution and importance of genetic redundancy, the evolution of regulatory networks and tissue-specific biology, and the importance of stochasticity (chance) in biology. He was recently awarded the Anniversary Prize of FEBS (the Federation of European Biochemical Societies).
 
The Russian-born researcher Fyodor Kondrashov is the leader of the Evolutionary Genomics group, at the CRG Bioinformatics and Genomics programme. Fyodor Kondrashov is also a young reasercher specializing in the broad field of evolutionary biology. He has been recently awarded the Dobzhansky Prize by the Society for the Study of Evolution. In his thirties, he has already published 5 scientific papers in Nature, among other scientific publications.
 
His group focuses on many different questions in different areas of biology and evolution. Currently, they are focused on computational studies of genomic information including sequences, expression data, protein and RNA structures, genetic and protein networks. They analyze these data from a population genetics and evolutionary theory perspective to describe novel evolutionary and biological phenomena.
 
Read the EMBO press release here.