When Marta Moita first heard whispers of a neuroscience programme taking shape in Lisbon, disbelief was her first reaction. “It just didn’t seem possible,” she recalls. She was a young Principal Investigator (PI) who had returned to Portugal after years abroad, because behavioural neuroscience (her passion) simply didn’t exist here. “So the prospect of not just having a lab, but a whole programme doing circuits and behavioral neuroscience in Lisbon, with people I knew and admired… it was just difficult to assimilate. Was this really happening?”

These four selected projects will receive more than €1.75 million in support. This funding underscores the commitment of the “la Caixa” Foundation to champion projects of unparalleled excellence that stand to significantly benefit public health. 

Listed below is more information about the four awardees from CF and GIMM, and their projects.
 

When Diego Carrasco first saw Lisbon from the air fifteen years ago, the city looked like a watercolour: terracotta rooftops glowing above the Tagus River. “I remember seeing the roofs from the plane,” he says. “It was so romantic. I thought this city is so old, and at the same time, so new.”
It was 2010, and Carrasco, a young Colombian doctor, had been selected to come to Portugal through a government programme that invited Latin American doctors to work in Europe. “I felt welcome from the very beginning, as it was the government itself that had opened the door.”

When we decided to discuss the “welcoming internationals” theme, Mert Erginkaya was among the first names that came to mind. Mert has been a close friend for over six years, and I’ve always felt he represents the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) community at its best. This piece is his story and, in a way, a bit of mine, because I was lucky enough to be part of Mert’s CF journey.

It was Friday evening, November 7th, and the entrance hall of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown didn’t look like itself. Where one would normally expect calm and quiet, the space pulsed with energy, the clinking of pots, the low hum of conversation, the scent of coriander, roasted pumpkin, and the promise of so much more.

Historically, scientists studying the brain, like neuroscientists and psychologists, worked separately from those studying the body, such as endocrinologists and physiologists. Research on how the nervous system interacts with the body has been growing, but “it kind of stops there, rarely making it past the neck to reach the brain again”, as Carlos Ribeiro puts it. Neuroscientists, meanwhile, often focus on higher brain functions without considering how body signals might influence them.

Fermented clues

Cheese and chocolate might not tempt a fruit fly’s palate, but to a hungry fly short on nutrients, their smell carries a hidden signal. When deprived of certain amino acids – the building blocks of protein – these tiny insects develop a surprisingly refined sense of smell that helps them track down not just food, but specific bacteria living in fermented foods.