According to the most recent Performance Report (2018), the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) is once again amongst the top research locations in the international arena, as well as the largest research hub in the South of Europe in the field of biomedicine. The updated numbers from the year 2018 confirm a critical mass of 1,400 people from 45 different countries and an aggregated research spending of more than 100 million € per year.
The PRBB is a multidisciplinary park with six independent research centres that live together in one common space, and where experts from different disciplines get cross-fertilized. They share a fully open research space and are highly successful in capturing competitive funding, especially for large scale projects.
Following the vision and mission of the PRBB, the park aims to provide the best environment for biomedical research of excellence. Some highlights from the last year confirm that the centres of the park – and the resesarchers – are indeed doing very well:
- The Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) has been classified as the 11th best young university in the world, the first university in Spain and 5th in Europe, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) index.
- In 2018, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) was once again ranked as one of the world’s most influential global health think tanks. In Europe, ISGlobal is the third most important global health think tank and the only outside the United Kingdom.
- The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is the second European institution and fifth worldwide in the Mapping Scientific Excellence ranking, preceded only by the Whitehead Institute, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Sanger Institute in the UK.
- In October 2018, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – Barcelona (EMBL), the newest institution to join the PRBB, was officially inaugurated with a symposium in the PRBB Auditorium. This new research unit will focus on tissue biology and disease modelling. EMBL is Europe’s flagship laboratory for the life sciences.
- The Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE: CSIC-UPF) has celebrated its 10 years, consolidating its project to discover life, deciphering evolution and conserving biodiversity.
- Many scientists from the PRBB centres are among the most cited in the world. The Highly Cited Researchers list recognises world-class researchers and has incorporated Jordi Alonso and Montse Fitó from Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Toni Gabaldón and Roderic Guigó from CRG, and Martine Vrijheid, Marc Nieuwenhuijsen and Jordi Sunyer from ISGlobal.
The 2018 PRBB Performance Report offers for the first time a selection of 20 research highlights of the year from micro to macro. It also shows, one more year, outstanding indicators for scientific excellence in terms of scientific publications – 12 papers in Science and Nature, 55 in other Nature group journals – and of events organised – 277 scientific conferences.
You can download the full Performance Report here in English (click here for the Catalan version).
You can also see Performance Reports from previous years here.
