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:

Vernos, Isabelle

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)

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Vernos, Isabelle
Research Professor at
Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Life depends on the ability of cells to divide while maintaining their genomic integrity. Cell division is therefore a critical process and yet involves the full reversible reorganization of most of intra-cellular components. In particular it involves the transient assembly of a microtubule based molecular machine, the bipolar spindle that organizes and segregates the chromosomes during cell division. We recently identified a novel mechanism involving the postranslational modification of the spindle microtubules that is required for chromosome segregation fidelity in normal cells. This mechanism is at stake in cancer cells that often misegregate chromosomes. Indeed aneuploidy and chromosomal instability are two hallmarks of particularly aggressive tumors. Our aim is to understand how this mechanism and other regulatory signalling pathways ensure the proper execution of mitosis and identify novel targets to prevent cancer cell proliferation.

Key words
Cell division

ORCID
: 0000-0003-1469-9214

RESEARCHER ID
: C-1687-2015
Vidal i Ferran, Anton

Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

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Vidal i Ferran, Anton
Research Professor at
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

Our current objectives encompass developing efficient, reliable and selective catalytic systems for synthetic transformations of interest, and studying their use to prepare relevant products for the life science and fine chemical sectors. Crucial aspects of this work include the modularity of the catalytic systems, the versatility of the synthetic strategies for their preparation and the incorporation of supramolecular motifs (when appropriate) in the catalyst’s structure to achieve additional function, taking into account the issue of sustainability. In terms of the catalytic transformations under homogeneous conditions that are being studied, our research interests focus on generating value-added products from unsaturated compounds through pivotal chemical transformations such as stereoselective hydrogenations, hydroformylations, hydroalkoxylations, hydrovinylations and hydroborations and C-C couplings on non-halogenated substrates.

Key words
Organic chemistry, Enantioselective catalysis, Preparation of industrially relevant enantiopure products, Development of sustainable production methods, Supramolecular Catalysis, Molecular Recognition, Chiral Functional Materials

ORCID
: 0000-0001-7926-1876

RESEARCHER ID
: A-5784-2013
Vidal, Fernando

Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)

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Vidal, Fernando
Research Professor at
Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)
Humanities
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Research interests

How do values and the production and application of scientific knowledge interact in particular contexts to shape views and practices of the human? This has been the common question of my main research interests, which have long concerned the history of the mind/brain sciences from the early modern “sciences of the soul” to contemporary neurosciences. I keep working in those areas (see Lines of Research), but now also explore that question in the framework of medical anthropology and phenomenology. My main current project, which involves a network of researchers, patients and caregivers in Europe, the US and Japan, examines how the "disorders of consciousness" articulate with conceptions of personhood and forms of subjectivity. It focuses on the locked-in syndrome (known to the public through the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a condition that leaves the mind intact, but the body almost entirely paralyzed.

Key words
History of the human sciences, Medical anthropology and phenomenology, Biomedical ethics, Science and society

ORCID
: 0000-0002-2956-8607

RESEARCHER ID
: L-7384-2014
Vila Bover, Miquel

Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR)

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Vila Bover, Miquel
Research Professor at
Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Our research is geared toward elucidating the molecular mechanisms of neuron cell death occurring in Parkinson's disease, the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer's dementia, in order to: (i) identify biomarkers for the diagnosis, early detection, patient stratification, disease progression, prognosis or response to treatment, (ii) identify new molecular targets for potential therapeutic intervention, (iii) develop novel therapeutic strategies with disease-modifying potential for this currently incurable disease, (iv) unravel molecular pathways common to other neurodegenerative diseases.

Key words
Neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson's disease, neurodegeneration, mitochondria, apoptosis, autophagy, neuroinflammation, intracellular inclusions, neuroprotection

ORCID
: 0000-0002-1352-989X
Wagner, Peter

Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

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Wagner, Peter
Research Professor at
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
Social & Behavioural Sciences
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Research interests

Peter Wagner's research is based in comparative historical and political sociology, social and political theory, and sociology of the social sciences. It focuses on the identification and comparative analysis of different forms of social and political modernity and of the historical trajectories and transformations of modern societies. Initially applied to a comparative political sociology of European societies, the research programme has been elaborated further towards a "world-sociology", focusing on Latin American, Southern African and more broadly BRICS societies in terms of global connectedness. In 2022, he also led the research cluster "Modernity in Central Asia" at U ofA Central Asia. Analyzing the persisting tensions between struggles for autonomy and forms of domination, it explores in the light of historical experiences in different world-regions the current possibilities of progress, not least in the face of human action reaching and exceeding planetary boundaries.

Key words
political sociology, social and political theory, comparative-historical sociology, European studies, sociology of the sciences
Wanner, Leo

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Wanner, Leo
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
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Research interests

Leo Wanner is working in the field of computational linguistics, teaching the computer to understand spoken and written natural language material, to supply people with information that might be useful to them and to interact with people. His research areas include human-computer interaction (in particular, the design and realization of conversational agents that reveal social and cultural competence), automatic written and spoken language generation, automatic summarization of written material, data-driven parsing, information extraction, and, more recently, abusive language analysis, author profiling and the information structure-prosody interface. He is furthermore interested in lexicology and lexicography, and there, in particular, in the automatic recognition, representation and use of lexical idiosyncrasies (so-called "collocations") by both native speakers and learners of a language. An important characteristics of his research is that it is multilingual.

Key words
computational linguistics, language generation, language analysis, summarization, lexicology, lexicography.