Guests from the IGC
Jonathan Howard graduated in Zoology from the University of Oxford and right after he spent a year in India, in the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Bhubaneswar founded by JBS Haldane, officially testing Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in wild peacocks. After this adventure, he signed up for a PhD in Oxford under the supervision of James Gowans, to work on the immunological function of small lymphocytes. As a post-doc Jonathan moved to Philadelphia to work with Darcy Wilson on cellular aspects of MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) antigen recognition. Later, Jonathan started his own lab at The Babraham Institute, in Cambridge UK, where he collaborated extensively with César Milstein at the beginning of the monoclonal antibody era, before working on antigen processing and presentation by MHC molecules. He then moved to the Institute for Genetics in Cologne, where he started to work on the response of cells to interferon gamma and quickly became distracted by the phenomena of cell-autonomous immunity. This led to his most recent work on the interaction between hosts and microbes, and especially on the ecological aspects of the pathogen-dependent selection and the impact of these phenomena on the host's immune system. To address this question, he studies the interaction between the microbe Taxoplasma gondii and its evolutionarily significant natural host, the wild house mouse.
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Jonathan became the Director of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in 2012 and he is also the head of the Host-Pathogen Co-evolution group at the same institute.
Jonathan Howard
Jorge Carneiro graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Porto and soon after he started his PhD, during which he worked on the development of immune network models incorporating B and T lymphocytes at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris. After this period, he did a short postdoc at the University of Utrecht, with Rob de Boer, getting an independent position at the IGC immediately after as the Principal Investigator of the Quantitative Organism Biology lab. Jorge's lab was at the forefront of theoretical and quantitative studies on the dynamics of regulatory T cells and used theoretical approaches to predict the mechanisms of action and repertoire selection of this cell population. Recently, Jorge got interested in modeling the morphodynamics of cells and tissues during embryogenesis and on the quantitative imaging techniques necessary to assess these models. Being comfortable with mathematics, statistics and biology gives Jorge an unique perspective on scientific problems and allows him to collaborate with investigators from different fields and backgrounds, from immunology to plant biology.
From 2012, Jorge has assumed the position of Deputy Director for Science at the Instituto Gulbenkian Ciência and still holds that position until today.
Jorge Carneiro
Élio Sucena graduated in Biology from the University of Lisbon and started his career by working on cell biology. However, he only found his true inner call after joining the Gulbenkian PhD Programme (PGDBM) and moving to David Stern’s lab, at Cambridge, where he worked on uncovering the genetic and developmental basis of interspecific differences between closely related species of Drosophila. After, he continued his work at Princeton University where he started to address questions regarding events of convergence and parallelism. He then did a Post-Doc at Miodrag Grbic lab, in Canada, where he performed comparative embryology studies using parasitoid wasps, which allowed him to revisit the phenomena of convergence with a different perspective and in a wider evolutionary timescale.
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Currently, Élio is the principal investigator of the Development and Evolution lab at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and he is also an assistant professor at the Animal Biology Department of the University of Lisbon. Besides these two positions, since 2013 he has embraced the responsibility directing the Gulbenkian PhD programme. In case you are wondering, his days have 24 hours just like ours.
Élio Sucena
Claudia Bank is one of the classical examples of how successful people can be if they are adventurous and fearless enough to change their work field. She did her undergraduate studies in mathematics and physics and during biophysics and biomathematics classes, she had contact with some evolution concepts and problems and eventually, fell in love with this field of Biology. This led her to pursue a PhD on speciation models. After that, and with the purpose to continue her transition into biology, Claudia decided to do a Post-Doc with Jess Jensen at EPFL, which gave her the opportunity to use her modeling expertise and apply it to experimental evolution data. Since January 2016, Claudia embraced the challenge of becoming the head investigator of the Evolutionary Dynamics laboratory at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência. Her research is focused on population genetics of adaptation and speciation, with special attention to the prevalence of epistasis and other interaction effects at the molecular and population level. Although her group is theoretical at its core, they work in close interaction with empirical researchers, having already established collaboration with other investigators at the institute.
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Besides being a passionate scientist, Claudia is also a fan of aquatic sports, such as paddling and kayaking, which turns the IGC into a privileged place for her, due to its closeness to the sea.
Claudia Bank
Paula Duque graduated in Plant Biology in Lisbon and during that period, her love for plants led her to join the Botanical Institute of the University of Cologne as an ERASMUS student. After that, she did her PhD in Physiology and Biochemistry in the University of Lisbon, but spent some time as a visiting student at the HortResearch Institute, in New Zealand. Before becoming the head of the Plant Molecular Biology Lab at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Paula gave classes at a Lisbon high school and then did her two post-docs at The Rockefeller University in New York. Currently, her lab’s research focuses on how plants perceive and response to environmental stress at the molecular level. They use the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to explore the role of alternative splicing on the regulation of gene expression and the involvement of membrane transporters of the Major Facilitator Superfamily in plant development and responses to abiotic stress.
