Meet the PI

Rui F. Oliveira, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine
Oeiras, Portugal
Professor
ISPA – Instituto Universitário de Ciências Psicológicas Sociais e da Vida
Lisboa, Portugal

 

 

Questions:

What is the research focus of your lab?

We study the mechanisms underlying social behavior and their evolution using an integrative approach that combines proximate (genetics, development, physiology) and ultimate (evolution, ecology) causation across different biological scales: from molecules (genes, neurotransmitters, neuropeptides) to neural circuits to behavior. Our research question is two-fold: on one hand, we aim to understand how organisms become social, that is, what are the cognitive, neural, and genetic mechanisms that implement social behaviour and how they have evolved. On the other hand, how social interactions, or their absence, can shape brain and physiology and impact health outcomes. We use zebrafish as a model organism to address these questions, given the genetic tools available for this species and its more complex social behavior than expected at first glance.How long have you been working with zebrafish?

I started working on zebrafish in 2007 and got my first zebrafish paper published in 2011. It was a purely behavioral study of winner-loser effects, showing that winning aggressive interactions increases the likelihood of winning subsequent ones, and vice versa. This was the paper that Hitoshi Okamoto followed up on, discovering that the effects of prior experience on agonistic behavior are regulated by the habenula.  

How long have you had your own lab?

I started my lab in 1997 at ISPA (University Institute for Psychological, Social, and Life Sciences), which is a university college where I am still the Chair of Biology and Neuroscience.  I’ve joined the Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC), in 2007, where I started working on zebrafish. In 2024, the IGC merged with the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School, becoming the Gulbenkian Institute of Molecular Medicine (GIMM), where I still have my lab.  Getting to know you better

Where were you born/where did you grow up?

I was born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal, where I did my undergraduate and graduate studies in Biology at the University of Lisbon.  

Tell us something about yourself in one sentence.

The quotation "The best way out is always through” from Robert Frost has been my life motto. In Science, as in life in general, to achieve any kind of success, defined by reaching an established goal, one needs a very large degree of resilience. I think that one needs to focus more on the processes than on the outcomes, which I see as natural consequences of well-established processes.

Science

Which of the current projects in your lab you are most excited about?

This question is in a way similar to Schindler’s list…  We have a couple of parallel projects ongoing in the lab, and I am quite enthusiastic about them all. But if I have to select one to highlight,  I would probably select the one on indirect genetic effects, in which we study how the genotypes of the individuals in the social network of a focal individual influence its phenotype. As a simple theoretical example to illustrate the concept, consider the smoking phenotype in humans. For simplicity of the argument, imagine there was a smoking allele linearly linked to the smoking phenotype. Even if you don’t have the allele, but if a significant number of peers have it, you can become a smoker through social facilitation. The gene-to-phenotype mapping that can be established would link alleles in your social environment to your smoking phenotype. In zebrafish, we use a model in which oxytocin receptor KO mutants with a social deficit are raised either in shoals of mutants or in shoals of wild-type fish. We have shown that, depending on the social environment in which they are raised, their social deficit can be rescued to a large extent. Furthermore, using nanopore sequencing, we have shown that wild types and mutants exhibit distinct methylation profiles and that raising mutants in wild-type groups induces changes in specific methylation sites in the genome. We are now interested in understanding which sensors zebrafish use to sense social information, how social information is processed in the brain to lead to differential methylation, and testing the causal role of specific methylation patterns in behavioral changes. Conceptually, this sets the stage for many socially driven behavioral changes that one can observe from basic mechanisms of memory to psychotherapy.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in science/research?

Nowadays, the landscape of scientific careers has been diversifying. For many years, there was an emphasis on making a career as a PI. Currently, there are many other opportunities in science management, science communication, and research staff roles, etc. But in any of these cases, you need to be passionate about what you do and feel it is almost like a life mission to be accomplished for the common good. Like democracy in politics, science is also not perfect for truth-seeking, but it is, by far, the best knowledge-making system produced by the human mind. Society in general would benefit enormously not only from the outcomes of scientific activity but also from understanding how science works and from incorporating critical thinking into societal decision-making. So the bottom-line of what I am trying to say is that there are many careers in science that can be fulfilling, not only being PI, and that all of them request that you must not in it for the money (there are much better paid jobs) or for social recognition (there are many other jobs with much higher social visibility), but rather for a genuine interest in understanding reality and sharing this interest with others.

Which part of the PI job you enjoy the most? Why?

I particularly like the creative component. Creating hypotheses and designing experiments requires alternating between divergent thinking, in which one needs to think outside the box with unlimited degrees of freedom to be able to consider groundbreaking, disruptive ideas, and convergent thinking, in which one has to consider the many scenarios created by divergent thinking against the knowledge already available to validate mor plausible hypothesis to be pursued. Intellectually, I find this very stimulating. When done collectively as a team, with other lab members from different backgrounds who bring diverse perspectives to brainstorming processes, it can be truly enlightening. 

Outside of work

What do you enjoy doing outside of work/lab?

I have two main hobbies outside of science: surfing and photography. I grew up by the beach, and I started surfing as a young kid. I still live near the beach and try to surf as much as I can, but not as much as I’d like to. Obviously, as one grows older (and heavier), one transitions from shortboards to longboards to stand-up paddleboards. But irrespective of the size of the board you are riding, what really matters is getting out in tune with the ocean and keeping wave gliding. My other hobby is photography. Only later in life did I take this more seriously, studying photography at an art school during my off hours, and I recently received my first artistic fellowship to create a photographic essay. The project, called “The Happiness of Fish”, departs from the Taoist parable in which Zhuangzi and his disciple Huizi discuss the possibility of perceiving the joy of other living beings without requiring formal proof, highlighting subjective experience and the capacity to place oneself in another’s perspective. Interestingly, this is a topic I also explore scientifically in our research on the social contagion of affective states in zebrafish. 

What career would you have liked if you were not a scientist?

As a young kid, I spent a lot of time imagining, planning, and building houses with Lego. In my teenage years, I drew sketches of houses and loved drawing in general. So I guess, if I hadn’t studied science, I would most likely have had some kind of career in something like architecture, which blends art with purposeful design. Curiously enough, my daughter is an architect.