The ceremony was opened by the Dean of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Jaume Casals, the coordinator of CSIC in Catalonia,  Lluís Calvo, and Tomàs Marquès-Bonet, Director of IBE. His speech was devoted to talk about IBE's achievements and perspectives, but also about the global mission of the institution.

In words of Marquès-Bonet, "IBE is about Science. Science to Discover life; science to Unravel evolution; science to Preserve biodiversity. It is only a small part of Science, if you want: Evolutionary Biology. But still a very exciting, wonderful and diverse field and, at the end of the day, Science".

"IBE is about Science. Science to Discover life; science to Unravel evolution; science to Preserve biodiversity". Tomàs Marquès-Bonet, Director of IBE

The opening ceremony was followed by the first scientific session, with José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta from Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo. He gave a talk entitled "Evolution of regulatory landscapes" on how vertebrates were made possible by enormous increases in regulatory connectivity of genes.

After the coffee break, it was time for the second scientific session.

It was opened by Nicole King, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California. During her talk on "choanoflagellates and the origin of animal multicellularity", she reminded the lesson that “there is no single key innovation that explains animal origins”.

She was followed by Toni Gabaldón, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS) and the Institute of Research in Biomedicine (IRB), with a talk entitled “Nothing in genomics makes sense if not in the light of evolution”. Gabaldón called for thinking laterally, and he also looked back on Darwin and Carl von Linné on this important date for evolutionary biology at IBE.

Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, from the Department of Computational Biology at the University of Lausanne, gave the last talk of the morning. Her speech entitled "Insights into early human migrations with modern and ancient genomic data" raised the question of whether "was one or two waves of Out of Africa?". Malaspinas reminded us that ancient and modern human genome still has lots to reveal.

The ceremony was closed with a lunch for all guests that toasted for the exciting future of IBE, yet to come.