Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship for Guilherme Bastos-Ventura

Guilherme Bastos-Ventura, postdoc in the Pinheiro lab, secured a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship which will fund his research on the mechanisms that control how the embryonic development clock is set.

Guilherme Bastos-Ventura joined the IMP as a postdoc in the lab of Diana Pinheiro last summer, and has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship which will fund his research on the molecular mechanisms that control the timing of embryonic development.

During embryonic development, thousands of cells move and acquire their different identities in a perfectly coordinated sequence, much like a choreographed dance. However, this “dance” happens at different speeds across species—for example, some fish embryos develop much faster than others, even under the same conditions. Bastos-Ventura’s research aims to understand what sets the pace of development by studying the embryos of model organism zebrafish and the Japanese rice fish medaka, as well as their hybrids. By combining live imaging, computational modelling, and advanced biophysics, he aims to show how cells generate the forces that shape tissues and whether these forces are responsible for the differences in developmental speed across species. His project is a collaboration with the lab of Andrea Pauli at the IMP and will help scientists understand the fundamental principles of morphogenesis in teleost fish—the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates.

Bastos-Ventura studied biochemistry at the University of Porto, where he worked with fruit flies to understand the molecular mechanisms that maintain tissue architecture. For his PhD in developmental biology at the University of Copenhagen, he switched to frog embryos, investigating how tissues are built during early development. Now, as a postdoc at the IMP, Bastos-Ventura has moved on to fish, continuing his passion for understanding how life develops.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships are competitively awarded by the European Commission in support of outstanding researchers across Europe. They promote excellence in science and foster international mobility. As one of the most sought-after funding programs for postdoctoral researchers, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships provide substantial support for independent research, career development, and interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling fellows to tackle some of the most fundamental questions in their fields.

Further Reading

Lab of Diana Pinheiro

Lab of Andrea Pauli