Francesc Palau Martínez

Francesc Palau graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 1982 from the University of Valencia, and obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Valencia in 1989.

Between 1985 and 1989 he specialized in Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of La Fe University Hospital in Valencia, with specific training in clinical and human genetics.

Between the years 1989 and 1990 he did a postdoctoral stay in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School of the University of London, where he studied the genetics and positional cloning of the Friedreich's ataxia gene.

He has been a specialist faculty member in the Genetics Unit and the Department of Pediatric Medicine at La Fe University Hospital from 1991 to 2000, and a researcher at the Biomedicine Institute of Valencia of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) from 2000 to 2015, being currently research professor on leave. He is a researcher at the CIBER for Rare Diseases, of which he was scientific director between 2006 and 2016.

In 2015 he joined Hospital Sant Joan de Déu as head of the Genetic and Molecular Medicine Service, and director of the Pediatric Institute of Rare Diseases (IPER), a position he held until July 2024. He was director of the Sant Joan de Recerca Institute Déu from 2015 to 2022 consultant at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. He is a medical associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Barcelona.

Currently, as SJD Distinguished Investigator, he co-leads the research group in Neurogenetics and Molecular Medicine where he studies the mechanisms involved in the axonopathies of neurogenetic diseases, the genetics and genomics of neurological and developmental diseases, and the gap between the genotype and the phenotype of rare diseases.