Marc Via

Associate Professor

I am a geneticist with a scientific interest in the genetic underpinnings of cognitive mechanisms involved in sensory processing and neural plasticity. I got a BS and a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Barcelona. I was a postdoctoral fellow (2007-2010) at the Dept. of Medicine and the Institute for Human Genetics, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) under the supervision of Drs. Esteban Burchard and Neil Risch. From 2010 to 2012, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona (Unit of Anthropology-Biology) under the supervision of Dr. Pedro Moral. Since 2012, I am a professor at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology and a researcher member of the Institut de Neurociències UBNEURO, at the University of Barcelona.

In all these positions, my research has focused on the study of human genetic diversity and how individual genetic differences underlie complex traits in humans. I have participated in studies of different complex phenotypes (drug response, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disorders, …). although my current project aims at establishing the role of genetic and epigenetic variants in the auditory processing of different acoustic stimuli (speech vs. non-speech, syllables vs. running speech) at different levels of the auditory hierarchy (cortical vs. subcortical stages). For this purpose, we collect electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from participants while conducting different experiments on sound processing together with genetic and epigenetic markers and behavioral data to measure the ability of participants in pitch discrimination tasks. This research has been funded by a project from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-099013-A-I00; PI: Marc Via).

A full list of my publications is available in Publons