The ICREAs

ICREA Research Professors form a vibrant community of scientists and researchers in all areas of knowledge that contribute to the advancement of humankind by exploring, interpreting and questioning. Have a look and learn about their amazing discoveries and findings here:

Lloret Fillol, Julio

Institut Català d'Investigació Química (ICIQ)

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Lloret Fillol, Julio
Research Professor at
Institut Català d'Investigació Química (ICIQ)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

My research mainly focuses on designing new catalysts for more sustainable chemistry using artificial photosynthetic schemes (APS) (ERC Consolidator Grant). Although artificial photosynthetic schemes are a potential solution for a future sustainable society, basic science still needs to be done to achieve this objective. Accordingly, my research dream is to address the production of fine chemicals using solely CO2, water and light as driving force. To this end, we are working on developing new methodologies to employ light as a driving force to produce reductive organic transformation and in the understanding of one of the most important reactions on the earth, water oxidation, identified as one of the bottlenecks for the production of solar fuels. Mechanistic investigations will aid in understanding multi-proton multi-electron transformations. These research areas can open new avenues for newer and greener synthetic methods.

Key words
Inorganic chemistry, homogeneous catalysis, reaction mechanism, water splitting, computational modelling

ORCID
: 0000-0001-9173-1105

RESEARCHER ID
: A-3102-2009
Llovet Bayer, Josep M

Fundació de Recerca Clínic Barcelona-Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (FRCB-IDIBAPS)

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Llovet Bayer, Josep M
Research Professor at
Fundació de Recerca Clínic Barcelona-Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (FRCB-IDIBAPS)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Prof Josep M. Llovet research has been focused on clinical and translational studies in liver cancer for the last 27 years. He is leading international randomized trials on novel targeted therapies and developing a molecular and immune classification of the disease, understanding the genetic aberrations and signaling pathways involved and in the identification of new molecular targeted therapies. He has organized the HCC Genomic Consortium that includes international research centers: IDIBAPS-Hospital Clínic, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, INSERM, Univ. Tuebingen, Dana-Farber-MIT-Broad Institute and NCI. The main areas of interest are a) identify biomarkers predicting response and resistance to checkpoint inhibitors and combination therapies for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) b) translate oncogenic drivers discoveries as targeted therapies in liver cancer, c) unraveling the molecular traits of NASH-HCC onset, progression and response to immunotherapies.

Key words
Hepatocellular carcinoma;cholangiocarcinoma;signal transduction pathways;molecular targeted therapies;molecular classification;trial design;genomics; gene signatures;translational research;mTOR signaling;Wnt signaling;IGF signaling;miRNA;nanooncology

ORCID
: 0000-0003-0547-2667

RESEARCHER ID
: D-4340-2014
Lobo, Jorge

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Lobo, Jorge
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Engineering Sciences
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Research interests

My early work in formal logic has been the basis of all my research, which is at the interface of theory and practice in computer science. Broadly, my goal is to automate the complex task of managing distributed systems (eg, networks of computers) in ways that have a solid theoretical foundation (rather than by ad-hoc means). Central to this effort is the concept of policies: collections of rules controlling the system’s behavior (eg, who can access private data). A major challenge is that amassing rules leads to conflicts (in access control, scheduling tasks, etc). My work has shown that the semantics of policies, as well as potential conflicts, can be defined axiomatically using disjunctive logic programs. Beyond conflict detection, the logic programming formulation provides a computational framework for conflict resolution, policy analysis and verification. Recent work focuses on how rules can be learned from examples (ie, inferred) using inductive logic programming techniques.

Key words
Knowledge Representation, Rule-System as Logic Program for Network & System Management, Policy Management and Security

ORCID
: 0000-0002-9438-0926
López de Sa, Dan

Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

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López de Sa, Dan
Research Professor at
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
Humanities
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Research interests

I work on matters issuing from words -vagueness, contextualism/relativism, rigidity- and issues where words don't really matter (much) -truthmaking, grounding, time, disagreement, values-. In between, I have an increasing interest in topics around gender, sex, and sexualities.

Key words
gender, race, & sexuality; disagreement; contextualism/relativism; grounding/truth-making/response-dependence; vagueness; rigidity

ORCID
: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4123-2858

RESEARCHER ID
: L-4535-2014
López-Bigas, Núria

Institut de Recerca Biomèdica (IRB Barcelona)

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López-Bigas, Núria
Research Professor at
Institut de Recerca Biomèdica (IRB Barcelona)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Núria López-Bigas research is focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective. She is particularly interested in the identification of cancer driver mutations, genes and pathways across tumor types and in understanding the mutational processes leading to accumulation of mutations in tumors. Among the most important achievements obtained by Lopez-Bigas' lab are the development of pioneer methods to identify driver genes (Oncodrive methods), the creation a compendium of cancer genes across cancer types: IntOGen (http://www.intogen.org), the discovery that protein-bound DNA impairs nucleotide excision repair (Radhakrishnan et al., 2016), the finding that exons have reduced mutation rate due to differential mismatch repair (Frigola et al., 2017), the discovery that nucleosome covered DNA shows a 10 bp periodicity on the rate of somatic and germline mutations (Pich et al., 2018), the identification of the mutational footprints of cancer therapies (Pich et al., 2019), the study of the evolution of relapse of adult T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Sentis et al., 2020), and the development of machine learning models to identify driver mutations in cancer genes (Muiños, Martinez-Jimenez et al 2021).

Key words
medical genomics, cancer research, computational biology

ORCID
: 000-0003-4925-8988

RESEARCHER ID
: F-6193-2011
Lowe, Rachel

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)

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Lowe, Rachel
Research Professor at
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Rachel’s research involves modelling the impact of environmental change on infectious disease epidemics, to inform disease control and prevention strategies. She has published high impact research on modelling climate-sensitive disease risk, with a focus on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in dengue early warning systems in Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Her group works on diverse projects including disentangling the role of land-use change and socio-economic pressures on malaria resurgence in the Amazon, modelling zoonotic disease risk at the human-animal-environment interface, and understanding the role of climate, cities and spatial connectivity on dengue transmission regimes. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases (ISNTD) Water Award for Research, in recognition of the quality of her research on the linkages between hydrometeorological extremes and dengue outbreaks and the multi-sectoral relevance for policy and practice.

Key words
global health resilience, planetary health, climate change, epidemiology, infectious diseases, statistical modelling, forecast evaluation, decision-support systems

ORCID
: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3939-7343

RESEARCHER ID
: H-1658-2015