After graduating in Biological Sciences (1997) at the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay, Jose Luiz Badano pursued his PhD studies at Baylor College of Medicine obtaining his degree from the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics in 2004. He further continued his training abroad by doing a 3-year post-doctoral stay at John Hopkins University. During these stages, he consolidated his interest in human genetics and molecular biology and in particular focused on a group of human conditions that are caused by dysfunction of a particular cellular organelle, the cilium.  Interestingly, his training allowed him to follow the natural transition from gene identification to the characterization and elucidation of the cellular role of their encoded proteins to understand human disease. First, the applicant heavily participated in the identification of causal and modifier genes for Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS), not only facilitating the dissection of the genetic basis of this disease but also showing that this historically considered autosomal recessive trait could present more complex patterns of inheritance. In this context, the applicant participated in the demonstration that some BBS families segregate mutant alleles at more than one BBS gene and that this alleles interact to modulate both the penetrance and expressivity of the disease. The identification of BBS genes also allowed the applicant to start with the characterization of the proteins that when mutated or absent led to this condition. Importantly, these studies first established the link between BBS and ciliary dysfunction and more recently are aiming to further determine the role of the cilium in different biological processes to understand how its perturbation results in the different clinical manifestations that characterize the ciliopathies.  After completing his post-doctoral training, he returned to Uruguay in 2007 and took a position as young group leader at the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, where he established a research laboratory that is focused on Human molecular genetics. In this short period he was able to form a group, obtain international funds, and initiate a new research project on the characterization of both causal and modifier BBS genes. Despite the availability of several BBS proteins, there is scarce functional information and so the applicant has decided to focus on the characterization of some of the BBS proteins using both in vitro and in vivo approaches. The in vitro experiments are aimed to identify novel interactors and understand the physiological relationship of these proteins with regard to the formation, maintenance and functionality of cilia. In vivo, he is attempting to generate a murine model where the gene of interest is knockdown through homologous recombination in ES cells. The originality of this project resides in its multidisciplinary approach, including simultaneous studies in biochemistry, protein production, structural biology, proteomics, cell biology and new transgenic animal models.  After his return to Uruguay, JL Badano has engaged with education and institutional development. In part, he was included as senior

professor in the PEDECIBA, the national PhD program and thus, took responsibilities in post-graduate teaching and training of students in his laboratory. Also, he was elected a member of the scientific council of the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo. His record of publication is outstanding in quality and impact. His papers (31) have merited almost 1550 international citations, with an average of 50 citations per publication. He has achieved an h index of 18 according to ISI.

Stephen P. Walborn is a brilliant scientist, at ease in both theoretical and experimental work. He is one of the two scientists in charge of a very active laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where frontier research in quantum optics and quantum information has been done in the last few years.  Although very young, he has already published 35 papers in the leading research journals in Physics, including two papers in Science, one in Nature, and one in Nature Physics, and already has an h-index 11. He played a major role in all these publications. His work has led to breakthroughs in the field of quantum information and has received a lot of attention worldwide.  His expertise and brilliance are recognised by the Brazilian and the International community. An evidence of this is the recent invited comment he wrote for Nature Physics on hyper-entangled states. Also, he got the coveted Ph. D. Thesis prize awarded by the Brazilian Physical Society, in 2005. The wide range of collaborators demonstrates his independence in recent years.

Stevens Rehen built his scientific and academic career at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He started in 1990 as an undergraduate student in Dr. Rafael Linden’s Laboratory. He got a B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences in 1993 and his Master’s degree in 1996. On the same year, he was accepted at the Ph.D. Program of the Biophysics Institute Carlos Chagas Filho, also working under the supervision of Prof. Linden. His degree was obtained in 2000, with excellence. His thesis and derived publications opened up the opportunity to obtain a position of Assistant Professor at UFRJ. In 2000, Dr. Rehen was selected as Fellow of the PEW Latin American Program in Biomedical Sciences, a distinction offered to the best young PhDs from Latin America. He spent five years working at Dr. Jerold Chun’s Laboratory at both UCSD and The Scripps Research Institute in United States. While Dr. Rehen could have easily remained in the United States, his devotion to the future of Brazilian science led him back home where he has already established a fully functional laboratory despite pervasive infrastructure challenges, and moreover is serving as the President of the Brazilian Neuroscience Society and Director of Research at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at UFRJ. His scientific contribution enrolls six book chapters, one book and 23 peer-reviewed articles published in excellent journals, such as PNAS, Nature Neuroscience and Journal of Neuroscience, for instance. These papers described for the first time mosaicism and aneuploidy in the human brain (Rehen et al 2001, Rehen et al. 2005) and reported the effect of phospholipids to establish gyri in the brain (Kingsbury and Rehen et al 2003, Kinsgsbury and Rehen et al. 2004). His work in both lysophospholipid signalling and neural aneuploidy represented seminal contributions to their respective fields. During the last three years, Dr. Stevens Rehen became the leader of very important Brazilian scientific program to study human embryonic stem cells, a network enterprise including several Brazilian laboratories, reported by the Instituto Virtual de Células-Tronco (www.ivct.org). He is co-founder of an international network that provides the donation of scientific equipments to developing countries, sponsored by the PEW Foundation. At the moment, Dr. Stevens Rehen is the thesis supervisor of 6 Ph.D. students and 2 M.Sc. students at the Morphological Sciences Graduate Program in UFRJ. Dr. Stevens Rehen is a young scientist who has an important scientific research subject and in addition he has also an outstanding perception of scientific policy