Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona. His educational background includes a B.S. in Biology from the University of Barcelona. He earned a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Barcelona. During his PhD he worked in improving the metazoan phylogenetic tree. Using molecular tools, he showed that acoel flatworms are not members of the Platyhelminthes but rather an independent lineage.  He completed a post-doctoral stage at the Dalhousie University (Canada) working on eukaryotic evolution using EST data. His current research interests include the study of the molecular mechanisms involved in the origin of multicellular animals, the analysis of genomes of different protists, the study of higher phylogenetic relationships of eukaryotes, and the understanding of the genetic repertoire of the last eukaryotic common ancestor.