When Joaquim Teixeira first heard about the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), it wasn’t in the media or a job ad, it was through a friend, who then invited him for a Happy Hour. “There were maybe twenty people at most, but the atmosphere had gravity. You could sense that something meaningful was about to happen and you wanted to be part of it”, he recalls.

The story of Cátia Feliciano and the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) began when she was still finishing her PhD in Neurobiology at Duke University in Durham, in the United States (USA). With a broad smile, she states that her great passion has always been neuroscience, and that when she heard of the plans to build a large research centre in Lisbon dedicated to this field, returning to Portugal became a possibility.