Juan M. Vaquerizas

Juanma (Spanish short form for ‘Juan Manuel’) is MRC Investigator and Programme Leader at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Imperial College London, UK. He has a long-standing interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms that allow cells to use their genetic information to perform normal cellular and physiological functions, such as development and differentiation, and how the mis-regulation of these mechanisms leads to disease, such as cancer. Recent highlights from Juanma's group include: i) the first characterisation of the emergence of chromatin conformation in vivo (Hug et al., Cell 2017), and during tissue-specification (Ing-Simmons et al., 2020); ii) the development of a low-input Hi-C protocol that can be used for clinical purposes (Díaz, Kruse et al., Nat Commun 2018); and, iii) the development of analytical tools for the analysis and integration of genomics data (Galan et al., Nat Genet 2020; Kruse et al., Genome Biol 2020). Full biography: Juanma studied Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. He received his PhD from the Spanish National Cancer Centre and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2008) where he worked on the characterisation of the human transcription factor repertoire (Vaquerizas et al., Nat Rev Genet 2009). Juanma trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Nick Luscombe at the EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK. Here, in collaboration with Asifa Akhtar’s laboratory he focused on the study of the dosage compensation mechanism in Drosophila melanogaster (Kind and Vaquerizas et al., Cell 2008; Vaquerizas, Suyama and Kind et al., PLoS Genet 2010). In 2012, Juanma was awarded a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI in Muenster. Since 2019, Juanma is MRC Investigator and Programme Leader at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, and Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) Professor at Imperial College London, UK.