Dr. Vilariño-Güell, a native of Spain, obtained his biology degree from the University of Barcelona and his PhD at the University of Leicester, England. He held two postdoctoral positions in England, first at the University of Oxford, and then at the Institute of Neurology University College London where he started his career studying the molecular bases of Parkinson’s disease. In 2007, he moved to the Department of Neuroscience in the Mayo Clinic Florida, to continue his work on Parkinson’s disease and became an Assistant Professor of Molecular Neuroscience in the laboratory of Professor Matthew J. Farrer. In 2010, Dr. Vilariño-Güell became a Research Associate for the Centre for Applied Neurogenetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His primary research interests are in neurodegenerative disorders, specifically Parkinson’s disease and related movement disorders, and focused on familial genetics, genomics, statistics and computational biology.