Dr. Arcadi Navarro got a PhD in Biology at the UAB. After quitting academia for some time, he went back to research as a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh.

He entered the UPF in 2002 and joined ICREA in 2006.

Between 2008-13 he was vice-director of the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint UPF-CSIC initiative.

Since 2010 he is Professor of Genetics at the UPF and leads a group on Evolutionary Genomics within the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences. He directed that Department between 2013 and 2016, a time during which he started a collaboration with the CRG, the EMBL-EBI and the BSC to co-direct the European Genome-Phenome Archive.

In 2016 he left academy again to become Secretary for Universities and Research at the Generalitat de Catalunya.

He left government in 2018 and, after a short sabbatical, he returned to all his previous appointments in January 2019.

Since 2020 he also directs the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.