ICREA Research Professor, UPF Assistant Professor, ERC Consolidator Grant
Nuria Lopez-Bigas is a biologist with a PhD in molecular genetics of deafness. She transitioned into bioinformatics during her postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Since 2006, she leads a research group in Barcelona focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective. She is particularly interested in the identification of cancer driver mutations, genes and pathways across tumor types and in the study of their targeted opportunities. She is also interest in understanding the mutational processes leading to the accumulation of mutations in cancer cells. Her lab has done important contributions in the discovery of the variation of mutation rate along the genome. They have recently discovered that transcription factors (TF) and nucleosomes interfere with DNA damage and DNA repair producing variable mutation rate along TF binding sites and nucleosomes covered regions.