Dr. Roger Paredes, the scientific director of the Foundation, joins as the medical coordinator of the curriculum for the new degree in Medicine at UPC

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) has appointed the doctor and scientist Roger Paredes as the medical coordinator of the curriculum for the new degree in Medicine, which will be offered from the 2026-2027 academic year, initially at the facilities of the Faculty of Optics and Optometry of Terrassa (FOOT).

Paredes, who has an extensive professional career in the scientific and healthcare fields, is currently the scientific director of the Fight Infections Foundation and head of the Infectious Diseases Service at the Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol. In this regard, he will join the UPC as a distinguished professor and medical coordinator of the curriculum for the new degree, in which a multidisciplinary team works.

The degree in Medicine, which was announced in April 2024, has the approval of the UPC Governing Council, and work is being carried out jointly with the Terrassa City Council and the Terrassa Health Consortium, owner of the Terrassa University Hospital, which will be the reference center for the new studies. The rector of the UPC, Daniel Crespo, explained that “with the incorporation of a figure of the prestige of Dr. Paredes as the medical coordinator of the curriculum, the project takes a definitive boost and reaffirms our commitment to offering high-quality medical studies, with innovative teaching methodologies and technological DNA, to be reference in the state university system.”

Nationally and internationally recognised scientist

Roger Paredes, a recognised expert in infectious diseases, obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees in Medicine and Surgery from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and specialised in HIV research at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, with the support of a “la Caixa” scholarship for postgraduate studies. His team at IrsiCaixa has demonstrated the clinical utility of deep sequencing of HIV-1 in high- and low-income countries. Currently, he is conducting pioneering research on the role of the gut microbiome in the pathogenesis of HIV infection and chronic inflammation.

The scientist coordinates the European project MISTRAL, funded with 10 million euros under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, and is the principal co-investigator in 3 projects of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, aimed at discovering the role of the human microbiome in the pathogenesis of HIV, transmission, and associated cancers.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Paredes has been the Spanish national coordinator of emblematic randomised clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), including ACTT-1 and 2, and the ACTIV-3/TICO and STRIVE platforms, which have defined the current standard of care for this disease in hospitalised and outpatient patients. The department he coordinates hosts the largest long COVID treatment unit in Spain.

Paredes is a member of the Steering Committee of the WHO HIV Drug Resistance Strategy (ResNet), the WHO HIV Treatment Guidelines Group, and the WHO Clinical Network on COVID-19. He is also a co-author of the Spanish HIV (GESIDA) and COVID-19 (SEIMC) treatment guidelines and a member of the IAS-USA HIV Drug Resistance Group. Additionally, he is an adjunct associate professor at the Centre for Global Health and Diseases, Department of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.