The Plenary of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical, and Natural Sciences (RAC) has appointed Tomàs Marquès as a new corresponding academic, joining the Natural Sciences section. He will oversee the area of Genomics and Evolution, joining the institution upon the proposal of academics Ana Crespo, Ángela Nieto, and Miguel Delibes. Marquès will soon deliver his acceptance speech at the RAC headquarters.

"Being accepted into the Royal Academy of Sciences is both an honor and a great responsibility," says Tomàs Marquès. "I see it as an opportunity not only to contribute to the institution's prestige by promoting excellence and scientific advancement but also to encourage the dissemination of scientific knowledge in society," he adds.

Tomàs Marquès Bonet (Barcelona, 1975) is a principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), where he leads the Comparative Genomics Group at IBE. He is an ICREA researcher at UPF and a professor in the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences at UPF, also affiliated with the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont (ICP).

Among the awards and grants he has received throughout his career are the ERC Starting Grant in 2010 and the Consolidator Grant from the same institution in 2019. In 2011, he was appointed an ICREA research professor at UPF; in 2013, he received the EMBO Young Investigator Award, and since 2017, he has been recognized as an international young investigator by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Additionally, he served as director of IBE (CSIC-UPF) from 2017 to 2020.