Gerard Muñoz-Pujol

Biography

Gerard Muñoz-Pujol recently earned his PhD in Biomedicine with the distinction of cum laude (2023). His academic journey includes a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2016), followed by two Master’s degrees in Neuroscience (2017) and Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (2023). He specializes in integrative omics approaches and functional studies to validate genetic mechanisms and therapeutic targets, particularly in inherited genetic disorders.

He has contributed to one international project (the CHARLIE Consortium, aimed at developing therapies and biomarkers for rare lysine metabolism disorders) and eight national projects. He is the author of nine indexed publications, being first or co-first author on four of them (PMIDs 36293220, 36450274, 37569695, 37718653). His work has been presented at six national and four international conferences, in oral presentations and posters. Notably, he received the Best Oral Communication award at the Spanish XV National Congress of Inborn Errors of Metabolism (Madrid, 2023) for his work in CRISPR/Cas9-based functional genomics tool to study variants of uncertain significance (PMID 37718653). During his PhD and before COVID-19 pandemic, Gerard received training in the labs of Dr. Holger Prokisch and Dr. Julien Gagneur at the Institute of Human Genetics in Munich (Germany, 2019) on the application of the DROP pipeline for RNA-seq analysis. This collaboration led to his co-authorship on Yépez VA et al. (2022, PMID 35379322).

Currently, as a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher at IR Sant Pau under Prof. Dr. Jordi Surrallés, Gerard applies his expertise in omics and gene editing to validate variants of uncertain significance in cancer predisposition DNA repair syndromes.

Gerard is affiliated with several professional societies, including the Center for Biomedical Network Research on Rare Diseases (CIBER-ER), the European Hematology Association (EHA), the Spanish Human Genetics Association (AEGH), and the Catalan Association of Biologists (CBC). He co-organized the SSIEM Course: Next-Generation Sequencing and Clinical Genomics (Barcelona, 2019). He has also been an invited speaker at several workshops and courses, including: "Functional studies of variants of uncertain significance in cancer predisposition DNA repair syndromes" at the Spanish Annual Meeting on Genomic Instability (CABIMER, 2024), "Generation of cellular models for inherited genetic disorders using CRISPR/Cas9" at Hospital Ramón y Cajal (IRYCIS Courses, Madrid, 2023 and 2024), and "Transcriptome analysis for diagnosing inherited genetic disorders" at CNAG (Workshop, Barcelona, 2022).