Lluis Montoliu

Lluis Montoliu (Barcelona, 1963) is a biologist (UB, 1986) and PhD in molecular genetics (CID-CSIC and UB, 1990) working as CSIC Research Scientist at the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB) in Madrid, where he has been leading his laboratory since 1997, after two postdoctoral periods at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg, 1991-95) and at UAB (Barcelona, 1995-96). He joined in 2007 the Biomedical Research Networking Center on Rare Diseases (CIBERER-ISCIII) as Group Leader, where he was appointed in 2016 coordinator of the CIBERER Neurosensory Disorders area and member of the CIBERER Steering committee. He is also Honorary Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid since 1998, and Director of the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA/INFRAFRONTIER) Spanish node since 2007. His lab is interested in understanding how genes are organized within mammalian genomes and has used different genetically-modified animals (mostly mice and zebrafish) to investigate the role of several non-coding DNA regulatory elements. He has been a leading contributor of the technology of artificial-chromosome-type transgenes. He has also generated numerous animal models of human rare diseases, such as albinism. Recently, he has pioneered the use of CRISPR-Cas9 tools in mice for the functional understanding of DNA regulatory elements and the production of new mouse models of different types of albinism. He is a member of the CSIC Ethics Committee since 2006 and of the ERC Ethics Panel since 2013. In 2006, he founded the International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT) for which he has served as President from inception to 2014. He currently is President of the European Society for Pigment Cell Research (ESPCR) and serves at the board of additional scientific societies such as IMGS and IFPCS.