Universitat de Barcelona Rafael Oliva studied medicine (1984) and completed his PhD (1986) in the University of Barcelona from Spain on the study of the nucleohistone to nucleoprotamine transition during spermatogenesis. Subsequently he performed postdoctoral trainings in the Department of Medical Biochemistry, University of Calgary, Canada (1986-1989) and as a Staff Scientist (1989-1990) at the Human Genome Center, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, Berkeley, CA, USA. He is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Barcelona, in charge of Coordinating and Teaching Medical Genetics, and is a Senior Consultor Geneticist (since 1996) at the Hospital Clínic, Barcelona. Current research interests include the study of the proteomics, genomics, genetics, epigenetics and metabolomics of the sperm cell to understand the mechanisms operating during spermatogenesis and fertilization and the molecular basis of male infertility. He is currently coordinating a collaborative European Union training network on Reproductive Biology (Reprotrain; www.reprotrain.eu) and is the director of the Human Genetics Laboratory at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (www.ub.edu/humangen). Recently has made contributions towards characterization of the human sperm proteome and the identification of proteomic anomalies present in infertile patients, with a particular focus on the chromatin associated proteins, structure and function.