Group Members

• Carles Lalueza-Fox, Group Leader | CSIC Research Professor
  contact: carles.lalueza.fox@gmail.com
• Short Biography: Carles Lalueza-Fox was born in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, Spain, in 1965, the youngest of four. He obtained his PhD in Biology at the University of Barcelona in 1995. Aftewards, he spent one year in Cambrige and another one in Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher, working always in paleogenetics. He also worked during a short period at the private genetic company deCODE Genetics, in Iceland. He belongs to the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and is currently a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. He is married, has two childs and lives in Sabadell, a small town outside Barcelona. He has published many papers on paleogenetics, in high-impact scientific journals. Among his works there is the first complete extinct mitochondrial genome, the first complete extinct nuclear gene and the first functional paleogenetic study. He is best known for his works on Neandertals, and was involved in the Neandertal Genome Project, directed by Professor Svante Pääbo. He is currently working on genomics from prehistoric Europeans and has published the first Mesolithic genome at Nature (2014). Besides his research, he is interested in communicating science to society, and has published different popular science books on human evolution, human diversity and paleogenetics. He has been awarded with four prizes on scientific literature, including those of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and the Catalan Foundation for Research (FCRI). He has also been awarded with the City of Barcelona prize for scientific research in 2007 and the Narcís Monturiol award (Generalitat de Catalunya) in 2018. He did mountaneering and, besides numerous routes in the Pyrenees and the Alps, he has ascended the Kilimanjaro (5,895 m) and the Aconcagua (6.962 m). Increasing age and fatherhood has moved him away from mountains. He is now collecting Roman Imperial denarii.

Vanessa Villalba Mouco  | Post Doctoral Researcher

contact: villalba@shh.mpg.de

Vanessa Villalba Mouco was born in Zaragoza, in 1989. She studied Biology at the University of Barcelona and she moved back to her city to completed a MSc in Molecular Biology. She always combined the Biology with Archaeology, starting to work with archaeological human remains during her Bachelor’s thesis (TFG) and taking part of many archaeological excavations. In 2015, she started her PhD in Archaeogenetics and isotopic analysis to understand the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Iberian Peninsula. She spent 3 out of 4 year of the PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History under the supervision of Wolfgang Haak. She continued as a postdoc researcher at the same institute for one year more and then she moved to Paleogenomics Lab. In our lab, she continues exploring the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods in Europe, the kin-relationships in Early Bronze Age societies and the genetic impact of the Islamic period in Iberia. In her free time, you can find her practising sports or recovering electrolytes lost in a terrace with a cold beer.

Pablo Carrión Quilis | PhD student

contact: pc.quilis@gmail.com

Pablo Carrión Quilis was born in València, Spain, in 1995. He studied Biology at the Universitat de València, with a one-year Erasums stay at the University of Sheffield. He then studied a Masters’ degree in Biological research at the Universitat de València where he joined the Biochemical Genetics and Biolotechnology for his final masters’ thesis researching on the Colorado Potato Beetle’s transcriptome. He moved to Barcelona where he earned a Masters’ degree in Bioinformatics at the Univertsitat Autònoma de Barcelona and joined our group. Now, he is carrying out his PhD, researching on the genetic changes that Europe underwent after the fall of the Roman Empire and during the Great Migration period. He enjoys practicing different sports and used to play Rugby during his university studies in València and Sheffield. In his spare time you can probably find him either trekking or at a concert hall.

Pere Renom Vilaró  | PhD student

contact: cogitoergomitto@gmail.com