Dr Marta Farré Belmonte

Dr Marta Farré Belmonte received a BSc in Genetics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB, Spain) in 2006. She then went on to purse a MSc on chromosome evolution in the same university from 2006 to 2008. During this period, she was awarded a 3-months fellowship at the University of Bari (Italy) to learn new techniques. 

In 2008, Dr Farré started her PhD project using genomics and bioinformatics to study genome evolution in mammalian species at UAB. She obtained a 10-month fellowship at a state-of-the-art lab at Yale University (USA) to improve her skills. She finished her PhD in 2012, and in the following month she moved to Aberystwyth University (UK) to start her first postdoc. After a year at Aberystwyth University, the lab moved to the Royal Veterinary College on September 2013, where she stayed until September 2018 as a research associate.

Dr Farré joined the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent in October 2018.

Lab webpage: https://www.farre-evogenomicslab.com

Google Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/y4wwaaub

During the final year project of her BSc, Dr Farré became interested in how species evolve and adapt to different environments through changes in their genomes, and this has been her main line of research ever since. 

She aims to study genome evolution and the genetic changes associated with individual and species differences, applying the newest comparative and functional genomic techniques and the great wealth of genomic data available. In particular, she focused on the dynamics of chromosomal evolution in mammals.

Although genome and chromosome evolution have been long studied we still know very little about the functional consequences of these changes and the role they might have played during evolution. To address these questions, the group uses ruminants as a model and take a multidisciplinary approach that combines experimental (WGS, RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq and Hi-C) and bioinformatic analysis, generating results of interest to diverse fields.

• BI324 Genetics and Evolution