TONI GABALDÓN, APPOINTED ICREA RESEARCH PROFESSOR
CRG group leader Toni Gabaldón has recently been appointed ICREA Research Professor. The Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) awards this recognition to scientists capable of leading new research groups, strengthening existing groups, and setting up new lines of research to help increase research in Catalonia.
Gabaldón heads the Comparative Genomics laboratory at the Bioinformatics and Genomics programme of the CRG. He focuses his research around the use of comparative genomics and phylogenomics to study the origin, evolution and function of complex biological systems. Through collaborations with experimental groups, his laboratory applies comparative genomics to discover new mechanisms and genes involved in interesting processes, especially those of clinical relevance. 
With this appointment, the CRG currently has 12 ICREA research professors, which represent around 40% of its faculty.

About Toni Gabaldón
Toni Gabaldón has a degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Valencia, with a special mention. After 4 years working on yeast gene expression regulation at the Biochemistry department of that university, he moved in 2001 to Nijmegen University (The Netherlands) where he worked in comparative genomics and evolution at the bioinformatics department of the NIjmegen Center for Molecular Life Sciences. In 2005 he obtained his PhD from the Nijmegen University, which obtained the NCMLS award for the best thesis of the year. He was awarded an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship to move to the bioinformatics department at CIPF (Valencia, Spain). In September 2008 he was appointed group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona, Spain), where he is leading the Comparative Genomics group. Dr. Gabaldón has authored five book chapters and more than 20 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, including Science and Nature. He teaches bioinformatics and comparative genomics in several Master courses and he is an associate professor at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain).