Interview with Amjad Parvaiz

As a young man, Amjad Parvaiz, now 54, wanted to become a “big trauma surgeon”. So after graduating from university in his home city of Lahore, in Pakistan, he moved to South Africa to do his trauma surgery training there. While in South Africa, in 1995, he says, “one of my bosses took me aside and said to me: ‘if you want to do 21st century surgery, go and learn laparoscopy.

Interview with Paulo Fidalgo

Paulo Fidalgo, 66, says that he has “two loves” at the Champalimaud Foundation: gastroenterology and oncological risk assessment. So it does not come as a surprise that he is both a gastroenterologist in the Digestive Unit of the Champalimaud Clinical Centre and the head of the Risk Assessment and Early Diagnosis Programme at this Centre.

The Lancet Breast Cancer Commission, a worldwide multidisciplinary team of leaders and patient advocates, published a few days ago a Comment article in the medical journal The Lancet calling for urgent action to ensure treatment equity for women with breast cancer no matter who they are and where they live. Fátima Cardoso, internationally renowned Director of the Breast Unit at the Champalimaud Foundation, is one of the authors and representative of the larger work group.

Ana Luísa Correia joined the CF in December 2021. Prior to that, she worked for several years at the Basel University Hospital in Switzerland. During her stay there, she made breakthrough discoveries with potentially important therapeutic implications. She intends to pursue this line of work at the CF.

Up until the discovery of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, in 1982, diseases of the stomach were thought to be due to excess gastric acidity. Today, we know that the vast majority of stomach cancers are caused by a sustained infection by Helicobacter, and that eradicating it is enough to drastically reduce stomach cancer risk. However, it is less known that, even after the bacteria’s eradication, unhealthy diets can promote the development of gastric cancers. And what almost nobody knows is that one of the main risk factors for stomach cancer is… salt.

What was your thesis question and what did you find?

My original thesis question was ‘How do we read mental states from facial expressions?’ However, a few months after presenting it, my PhD project changed 180 degrees and the final question ended up being ‘How can deep learning help to understand collective behaviour in zebrafish?’ We found that deep learning is a very po

But there’s more! During the interview, they also told us about great places to visit, cool music, fascinating podcasts and other discoveries they made this year. We couldn’t fit everything in the final cut, so we’ve listed their top recommendations below.

To view all 2021 individual episodes, tune in to the Zoom-In on Champalimaud YouTube playlist.