A Portuguese neuroscientist, he is the CEO and director of the world's largest brain research centre, the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute in the US. He is a professor at Columbia University in New York. He researches the neurobiology of action in health and disease. His laboratory uses approaches from genetics, electrophysiology, optics and behaviour to investigate the mechanisms that underlie action activation and action learning. His findings have led to new hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying the creation of movement and motor dysfunction in Parkinson's disease.
He graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1996 and started the GABBA programme (Graduate Programme in Areas of Basic and Applied Biology) at the University of Porto the following year. He did post-doctoral studies with Alcino Silva at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and then post-doctoral work with Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University.
He was director of Champalimaud Research and deputy director and researcher of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme. In 2012, he became an international early career scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and received the Young Researcher Award from the Society for Neuroscience. He is President of the American-Portuguese Biomedical Research Fund.
He was awarded the Ariëns Kappers Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U19 Brain Initiative Award (15.3 million dollars over five years). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is a Commander of the Order of Sant'Iago da Espada (2014) and received the silver medal from the Portuguese Ministry of Health (2014).

Last updated: November 2021