Miquel Vila received his M.D. from the University of Barcelona Medical School in 1993. He then moved to the laboratory of Experimental Neurology and Therapeutics (Prof. Yves Agid) at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (France), where he obtained his Master degree and PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Paris VI (Pierre et Marie Curie), under the supervision of Dr Etienne Hirsch. His PhD work was devoted to the study of the functional consequences of dopaminergic neurodegeneration on the functioning of the basal ganglia. From 1998 to 2001, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory of Dr Serge Przedborski at the Department of Neurology, Movement Disorders Division, at Columbia University (New York, USA), focusing on the molecular mechanisms of neuronal death in Parkinson’s disease. To continue his work, he obtained in 2001 a position as an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Columbia University. In December 2005, he moved back to Barcelona as an ICREA Research Professor to develop a new research lab on Neurodegeneration at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute, thanks to the support of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Excellence Grants program. In addition, he holds positions as associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and as Principal Investigator of the Spanish Network of Excellence on Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED).