Alfonso Martinez Arias

Talk Title: Intrinsic and extrinsic organizers of mammalian body plan: an embryo model perspective

Alfonso Martinez Arias is an ICREA Research professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, where he moved in 2020 after 38 years at the University of Cambridge (UK). 

He has a long standing interest in Systems approaches to animal development and, over the last ten years, has pioneered the “gastruloid’ system, a pluripotent stem cell system to study mammalian gastrulation and body plan engineering. He has written text books on Developmental biology and, in 2023 published “The Master builder’ where he contrasts the roles that genes and cells play in organismal building.