Fernando Albericio, senior professor of Organic Chemistry at the UB, has been appointed director of the PCB. The PCB's Board of Trustees has selected a new management team. This decision has also brought about the naming of Montserrat Vendrell as deputy director. The new team replaces Màrius Rubiralta and Josep Samitier, who, on 9 June, took up their new posts as rector and vice-rector of International Policy of the UB, respectively.

Fernando Albericio (Barcelona, 1953) graduated in Chemistry from the UB and obtained his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the same institution. After several post-doctoral stages in the U.S. and France, in 1985 he rejoined the UB to undertake teaching and research activities. From 1992-1994 he directed the Peptide Research Centre at Millipore-Waters in Boston. In recent years, he has combined his teaching activities at the Faculty of Chemistry with the management of one of the groups that comprises the Institute of Biomedical Research at the PCB (IRB-PCB), in which he directs the Combinatorial Chemistry Laboratory. His main lines of research focus on the study of the synthesis and structure-activity relation of anti-tumoral compounds, many of marine origin, and other compounds related to pathologies of the central nervous system and metabolism.

Fernando Albericio is the author of more than 400 articles, which have been published in leading international journals and he has taken out 18 patents. He is also co-author of several books, among which are: Aproximació química a la síntesi de pèptids i proteïnes (1997)(Approaches to peptide and protein synthesis) and Síntesi en fase sòlida. Una guia pràctica (Solid Phase synthesis. A practical guide) (2000). In 1994, he was awarded the Leonidas Zervas prize by the European Peptide Society, and in 2003 he received an award from the Generalitat de Catalunya for the Promotion of University Research.

Montserrat Vendrell (Barcelona, 1964) obtained a Ph.D. in Biology from the UB and has more than 10 years experience in biomedical and biotechnological research. As a post-doc researcher, she performed her activities at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey (U.S.) from 1992 to 1994 and later, from 1995 to 1997, at the Barcelona Institute of Molecular Biology of the CSIC. In 1997, she completed a Masters in Scientific Communication at the Pompeu Fabra University.

Since 2002, Montserrat Vendrell has occupied the post of scientific director at the PCB, which, among other duties, has involved the design and direction of the scientific services and biotechnology platforms, in addition to promoting international relations in biotech networks. Furthermore, she has been the PCB representative in the managerial team of the CIDEM-PCB Bioincubator, and, during 2005, has collaborated with the Generalitat de Catalunya in launching and developing the Catalonia BioCluster.