Dr Rodrigo Siqueira de Souza

I started my education with an undergrad in biology heavily focused on zoology and evolution at the University of Brazil, from where I got my quantifiable output in 2010, a publication dealing with the 3D modelling of fossils. I always had an aptitude for computers, gravitating towards projects that involved modelling. This profile led me to a master's in neuroscience at the same institution. There I worked with brain evolution and neuroanatomy, describing the brains of a whole mammalian order, the artiodactyls, which was the main publication of this period in the Frontiers in Neuroanatomy journal (in 2014). This period had an additional publication in the journal PNAS that came in 2019. I spent a significant amount of time during these early years studying programming and statistics to better understand and analyse my data. After graduating I was awarded a scholarship by the CNPq of Brazil to pursue my PhD. I chose the degree of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. There, I developed a complete toolbox to analyse the electrical signals derived from neuronal cell cultures placed onto multielectrode arrays. My work included the complete cycle, from developing a protocol to differentiating neurons from stem cells to writing the complete code of the toolbox, available in a public repository. The conclusion of my PhD allowed me to be hired by the Active Touch Laboratory at the University of Sheffield to work with computational neuroscience and neuroprosthetics. My project during this post-doc won the best research prize at the INSIGNEO Institute and was published in the journal iScience (2022). Now, affiliated with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, my research interests include general intelligence, network neuroscience, brain development and brain evolution. Additionally, I am trying to understand cell fates in Glioblastoma Multiforme.