Carles Calatayud studied Biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of València (Spain). During his bachelor studies, he got familiarized with the stem cell field and became fascinated by the potential these cells had both in biomedical research and in regenerative medicine. Moved by his interest in stem cells, he joined the laboratories of Antonella Consiglio and Ángel Raya at the University of Barcelona and the Center for Regenerative Medicine of Barcelona respectively. During his PhD, he used induced pluripotent stem cells from Parkinson's disease patients to as well as gene editing techniques (CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs) study the effect of the genetic background on the penetrance of the well-established disease causing mutation LRRK2 G2019S. As a result, he developed valuable in vitro tools (Calatayud et al., 2019; Di Domenico et al., 2019) and made important insights into mechanism contributing to Parkinson's disease (Kim, Calatayud, Guha et al., 2018; Carola, Malagarriga, Calatayud et al., 2021). After completing his PhD studies, Carles joined the Verstreken lab at the VIB-KU Leuven, where he keeps on pursuing his longstanding goal of developing highly reproducible stem cell models to address fundamental questions in Parkinson's disease.