Luis Serrano, Ph.D.

Opening Keynote

Luis Serrano received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology at the Centro de Biología Molecular (CSIC-UAM) of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1985. During his post-doc, he spent four years in the laboratory of Professor A.R. Fersht, at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the United Kingdom where he focused his research on protein folding.

In 1993, Serrano was appointed the Head of Group at the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany where he continued to base his research on protein folding and design. He was soon named Senior Principal Investigator, and in 2003, promoted to Head of the Structural & Computational Biology program.

In 2006, Serrano was also named Head of Program at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and soon after this appointment, 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 on July 2011. Since then, he has been an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor.

Serrano is a member of the Spanish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM), member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences (Spain). He received the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the City of Barcelona prize (science category) in 2009, the Francisco Cobos award in 2018 and finally, he was appointed doctor honoris causa by the Miguel Hernández University of Elche in 2022.

Serrano has published more than 380 publications and has been awarded three ERC Advanced Grants and three ERC Proof of Concept grants. Among his other accomplishments and awards, he is also the Professor of ICREA, has directed 20 Ph.D. thesis and was involved in the creation of one of the first Spanish Biotech Companies (Diverdrugs). He is also co-founder of Cellzome, EnVivo, TRISKEL, Pulmobiotics and Orikine biotech companies and was previously the Director and Founder of the association of European Institutes of Excellence EU-LIFE and of the association of Spanish institutes of excellence, Severo Ochoa and Maria de Maeztu (SOMMa).