Directorate

Dr. Jordi Surrallés obtained his PhD in Genetics from UAB in 1994. After several years working at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki and at the Faculty of Medicine of Leiden University in the Netherlands, he returned to UAB, where he started his own research group in the late 1990s. He has served as Director of the Department of Genetics and Microbiology at UAB and Director of the Genetics Service at Hospital de Sant Pau, where he combined clinical duties with teaching and research activities, for which he has received several awards, including the ICREA Acadèmia award on three occasions.

He is currently Professor of Genetics at UAB, Director of the Master’s Degree in Clinical Genetics at UAB, Consultant at the Genetics Service of Hospital de Sant Pau, Group Leader at CIBER for Rare Diseases, and since October 2019 he has served as Scientific Director of the Research Institute of Hospital de Sant Pau and the IIB Sant Pau.

He is an expert in the field of diseases with genetic predisposition to cancer, where he has led the discovery of several genes involved in hereditary cancer. His work includes both basic and clinical-translational research aimed at understanding the role of DNA repair in cancer, improving diagnostics, discovering new genes, and developing new therapeutic alternatives. He has published more than 120 scientific articles, supervised 16 doctoral theses, led more than 40 research projects funded by national and international organizations, participated in several clinical trials involving next-generation therapies such as gene therapy, and achieved the designation of two orphan drugs by the European Medicines Agency. He is also the inventor of five patents, directs a biobank of DNA repair syndromes, and has discovered eight genes involved in tumor predisposition syndromes.