Tomàs Marquès-Bonet has been appointed new Vice Director of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) in substitution of David Comas, who was recently appointed Director of the UPF CEXS Department.

Tomàs Marquès-Bonet is the leader of the Comparative Genomics team with dual affiliation at the CNAG and IBE. He started his own lab in 2010 at the UPF after a Marie Curie fellowship in Seattle, University of Washington. In 2010 he obtained the competitive ERC Starting Grant to establish his own group centered on the analysis genetic diversity in humans in the context of great ape evolution. In 2011, he obtained a Spanish MICINN Grant to study the effects of reorganizations in the phenotype and was selected as an ICREA research investigator. In 2013, he was selected for the EMBO young Investigator award. He has been part of many Genome Consortia (Neanderthal, Denisovan, Bonobo, Gorilla, Orangutan, Gibbon, Marmoset, Lynx, Cats, E-shark), in the section of duplications and structural variation in most of them.

The Comparative Genomics works on the characterization of genomic differences in a wide variety of organisms, including humans, apes, dogs, plants and fish. The final goal is to understand the phenotypic impact of all these variants by making use of well-defined organisms and the fine scale exploration of all of variants.