About me

Dr. Manuel Valero is the Group Leader at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) in Barcelona (Spain). He did his postdoc (2018-2022) in the laboratory of György Buzsáki at the NYU Neuroscience Institute in New York, US. Funded by the EMBO and HFSP, Dr. Valero developed novel high-resolution optogenetics strategies and studied inhibitory neural motifs. During his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Liset Menéndez de la Prida, he used a wide set of tools- single-cell recordings in freely moving rodents, simultaneous intracellular and extracellular recordings, large-scale multi-site electrophysiology, and optogenetic manipulations-to describe the network architecture behind hippocampal sharp-wave ripples in both normal and epileptic brains. The main goal of his laboratory is to provide a deep understanding of how groups of neurons interact and tune their connections to generate neural representations of the world, and ultimately, learning and memories. Dr. Valero’s research seeks to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying cognition and to understand how imbalances in the network lead to pathological conditions.