The Director of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), Dr. Arcadi Navarro, has been appointed a full member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona (RACAB). At the admission session, held at the institution's headquarters, Dr. Navarro presented the report "Big data in biology: genomics, health and evolution«. In his speech, in which he placed special emphasis on the work he has developed in recent years at the head of the European Genome-Phenome Archive (EGA) of the Centre for Genetic Regulation, he addressed the impact of medical genomics and data science on biology, focusing in particular on concepts such as "Big Data" and "Open Science", and he stressed the importance of sharing data within the global scientific community to promote collaboration and accelerate innovation. "Today there is no scientific progress without data sharing. Therefore, and in a very rigorous sense, the human future will either be shared or it will not be.“, said Dr. Navarro.
The event was attended by the president of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, Cristina Maragall, the rector of the Pompeu Fabra University, Laia de Navidad, the former councillors Andreu Mas-Colell and Josep Maria Argimon, currently Director of the Scientific Infrastructure of the BBRC and the associate director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Josep Maria Martorell.
Dr. Navarro, who has received the 35th medal, is the first data science expert in joining the Biology section as a full academic. This appointment undoubtedly represents a recognition of his scientific merits as a geneticist. In addition to being the current director of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center, Arcadi Navarro is a professor and ICREA researcher at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences from Pompeu Fabra University and director of the Evolutionary Genomics laboratory at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and the European Genome-Phenome Archive (EGA) in the Center for Genomic RegulationHis research activity has focused mainly on the field of population genetics, molecular evolution, relationships between genomes and phenomena, and evolutionary medicine.
