Fitxa persona

Dr Torres-Pérez (he/him) is a neurobiologist interested in the epigenetic landscape regulating neural development and its impact on neurodegenerative disorders. Dr Torres-Pérez currently holds a Ramón y Cajal contract at the University of Valencia, where he leads an independent research program on the epigenetic mechanisms underlying pain and sociability-related disorders, using both rodent and zebrafish (Danio rerio) models. He has been successfully involved in a wide range of multi-disciplinary projects spanning from clinical settings to academic scenarios with engineers/materials scientists and experimental psychologists.

Dr Torres-Pérez gained his undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Valencia (UV) and then moved to Oxford for a 6-month internship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. After that, Dr Torres-Pérez completed an MRes in Neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. For his PhD in Clinical Medicine Research, Dr Torres-Pérez worked with Dr Istvan Nagy at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Imperial College London. He investigated the role different epigenetic tags, mainly histone post-translational modifications, play in the transition from acute to chronic pain at neurons and glial cells of both spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia.

Dr Torres-Pérez has held two postdoctoral positions at Queen Mary University of London. First at the School of Engineering and Materials Science, where he performed high-resolution electrophysiology of primary cilia and single-cell calcium recordings. Secondly, at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, where he used zebrafish as a reverse genetic model for comparative cognition.

Right after, he moved to the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College London (White City Campus) for a Research Associate position in Epigenetics. There, Dr Torres-Pérez obtimised an adapted version of CUT&RUN (Cleavage Under Targets and Release Using Nuclease) tailored for the processing of human brain samples.

He joined the University of Valencia (UV) as a distinguished researcher under the APOST (Generalitat Valenciana) and then under a María Zambrano program (Ministry of Universities, Spain) before obtaining his Ramón y Cajal. His recent achievements include high-impact publications as first and senior author, the successful coordination of international collaborations, and invitations to speak at national and international neuroscience conferences.