Hernando del Portillo, PhD, is a research professor at the Barcelona Centre for International Health Research (CRESIB) at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. He joined CRESIB as an ICREA research professor in 2007 with the specific objective of discovering the role of the spleen in natural infections, to discover new antigens for vaccine development, and to developing enabling tools to advance research facilitating new intervention strategies against P. vivax. He has pursued molecular studies in malaria trying to unveil the mechanisms of virulence, drug resistance and the establishment of chronic infections to develop rational control strategies. He spent several years in Brazil where he consolidated a multi-Centric and Inter-disciplinary malaria programme. The cornerstone of his research activity has been the discovery of the largest subtelomeric multigene variant and virulent family in Plasmodium vivax malaria proposed to be involved in a new spleen immune evasion mechanism. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia and completed postdoctoral training at the New York University Medical Centre and the Institut Pasteur specializing in molecular biology of malaria parasites.