Luis Serrano

Luis Serrano was born in Madrid on July 2, 1959, and graduated in Biological Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid (1981). He has a Master’s in Science from Complutense University (1982) and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1985). He received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology at the Centro de Biología Molecular (CSIC-UAM) of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1987 and the University of Cambridge in 1991. Subsequently, he spent 4 years in the laboratory of Professor Alan Fersht, at the Medical Research Council (MRC), in the United Kingdom, where he focused his research on protein folding.

He was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in Madrid, from 1988 to 1992. In 1993 he was appointed Head of Group at the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology (EMBL), in Heidelberg, Germany, and focused his work on protein folding and design. In the following years at the EMBL, he was named Senior Principal Investigator, in 2003, and Head of the Structural & Computational Biology program, in 2006, the time he began to work on Systems Biology. In 2006 he was also named Head of the program at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO). In addition, in 1999, he was appointed research professor at the CSIC.

At the end of 2006, he moved back to Spain to direct the Systems Biology program at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), where he also served as deputy director until his appointment as director in mid-2011. Since 2006 he has been an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor. Currently, his research group focuses on synthetic biology, engineering, and the design of biological systems.