Salvador Ventura - Biography#

Salvador Ventura obtained his PhD in Biology (1998) at Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). In 1999-2001 he was a postdoc at Structural Biology Dep. at EMBL-Heidelberg (Germany). He obtained in 2002 a 5-year tenure track Ramón y Cajal position at UAB, where he became Associate Prof. in 2006 and Full Prof. in 2012. During this period, he was visitor scientist at Harvard Medical School (USA), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) and Univ. Tor Vergata in Rome (Italy) (accounting 1 year in total). In this training period he published articles as first author in Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol., TIBS, PNAS, JMB, JBC among other journals.

In 2005 he started the Protein Folding and Conformational Diseases Group at Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB) of UAB. As group leader, he has published 258 articles (from a total of 276), in 78 % of them as corresponding author. He has directed 18 PhD thesis (13 from 2012), including the one awarded with the SEBBM prize to the Best doctoral thesis in 2021. 7 funded PhD thesis are running.

He authored 16 patent applications and participated in 47 projects achieved in competitive calls (from a total of 58) and 11 contracts with industry, including SOM Biotech S.L., CORINO Therapeutics INC, SERVIER, Grifols, Pharmacelera S.L., LeanBio S.L. and Nereid Therapeutics. In 2022, he co-founded Eureka Nanobioengineering (https://eurekanbe.tech), a company aimed to create advanced functional nanobiomaterials.

Ventura’s lab uses a multidisciplinary computational and experimental approach to address fundamental aspects of protein misfolding and aggregation. In addition to define the basic mechanistic principles underlying these processes, they aim to understand how their deregulation leads to the formation of toxic amyloids and the onset of human conformational diseases; with the idea of developing innovative therapeutics to treat these pathologies. In addition, this knowledge is exploited to design and produce novel self-assembled multifunctional materials for nanotechnology applications.

S. Ventura is also the coordinator of the Protein Structure and Aggregation group, a consolidated group of Generalitat de Catalunya (12 Drs and 31 Members). In 2017-20 he was Director of the IBB (UAB) and since 2018 he is in the Direction Council of the Reference Network in Biotechnology of Catalonia.

Since 2015: Invited /Keynote /Plenary Speaker in 33 International and National Congresses.
Since 2015: Member of the organizing committee of 10 international congresses.