Abstract

Miguel Torres trained in Drosophila Genetics during his PhD (1991) with Dr. Lucas Sánchez (CIB-CSIC, Madrid) and later in Mouse Developmental Genetics during his Postdoc at the MPI with Dr Peter Gruss. He established an independent research group at the National Center for Biotechnology, CSIC , Madrid in 1996 and moved in 2007 to CNIC where he now coordinates the Cardiovascular Regeneration Program. His group has a strong focus on understanding organ development and regeneration. Dr Torres group characterized the role of homeobox genes and signaling pathways in establishing positional information along the limb proximo-distal axis during development and regeneration. A second topic of interest has been understanding the role of cell death in embryonic development. The group demonstrated the conservation of cell death pathways in metazoan evolution and demonstrated the relevance of cell death and cell competition in mammalian tissue homeostasis and regeneration. The group has also developed clonal analysis strategies and live imaging tools that allowed defining new lineage relationships and tissue dynamics in limb and cardiovascular development.