Fernando Codá Marques was born on October 8th of 1979 in Sao Carlos, Brazil. Soon after, he moved to and was raised in Maceio, state of Alagoas, where his family was from and where he attended elementary and high schools. He has obtained a B.S. degree  in Mathematics from Universidade Federal de Alagoas in 1999,  simultaneously with an M.S. degree in Mathematics from IMPA. He moved to the United States in 2000, and in 2003 he obtained  a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Cornell University. In his Ph. D. thesis, written under the supervision of Prof. José F. Escobar, he derived some new estimates with which he established a special case of the Compactness Conjecture - an important problem in conformal geometry proposed by R. Schoen in 1988. He is a Professor of Mathematics at IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since the year of 2003. He was recently promoted to Full Professor, in 2010. During the academic year of 2005-2006 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, working under the guidance of Prof. Richard Schoen. The ideas developed during this visit were fundamental to the complete solution of the Compactness Conjecture, obtained  in 2009 after a series of three papers (Brendle, Brendle-Marques, Khuri-Marques-Schoen). In the fall of 2008 he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, USA, where he participated in the special program on Conformal Geometry organized by Prof. Alice Chang. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2008, and at Stanford University in the years of 2009 and 2010.  In 2001 he was awarded the Battig Prize, an annual prize given to graduate students at Cornell University selected on basis of their academic performance. In 2008 he has been granted the Young Scientist Fellowship by FAPERJ, Rio de Janeiro. In 2009 he was elected an Affiliated Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and deserved a Special Mention of UMALCA, the Latin American Congress of Mathematicians. He has supervised the Ph. D. dissertations of Sergio Almaraz and Almir Silva Santos, both defended at IMPA in 2009.  He is mainly interested  in the interplay between Differential Geometry and Nonlinear Analysis. In 2010 he was an invited speaker in the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), held in Hyderabad, India. He delivered a 45-minute lecture in the Geometry Section on his contributions to scalar curvature problems in Conformal Geometry and in connection with the Ricci flow with surgery. In a recent paper, joint with  Brendle and Neves, and to appear in Invent. Mat., he found counterexamples to a Conjecture of Min-Oo. This conjecture has its roots in the celebrated Positive Mass Theorem of General Relativity (Schoen-Yau, Witten), and was the subject of study of many people.

Professor Larrondo is a distinguished Chilean fungal molecular biologist that, during his doctoral training, studied lignin-degrading basidiomycetes. As part of this work, he participated in the pioneering effort of sequencing and annotating the genome of the white-rot fungus Phanerochaete chrysosporium that, back in 2004, corresponded to the second genome of a filamentous fungus to be published. In addition, Dr. Larrondo was the first scientist to describe and characterize a new type of extracellular ferroxidase, a founding member of a new and growing branch within the multicopper oxidase family of proteins. His Ph.D.  Thesis work, conducted in the lab of Dr. Rafael Vicuña in Chile, also got him involved in collaborating in other international genome projects of biomass degrading fungi. His interests in fungal gene expression and genomics prompted him to move to a model fungal organism: the ascomycete Neurospora crassa. Thus, in 2004, he joined the laboratory of the U.S. National Academy Member Dr. Jay C. Dunlap at Dartmouth Medical School where he studied the mechanisms involved in circadian gene expression. Dr. Dunlap Lab has been the leading group in a massive Neurospora Functional Genomics PO1 project, aiming

to generate deletion strains for each one of the 10,000 genes of this organism. This provided a great opportunity where to learn Functional Genomics and thus, Dr. Larrondo contributed to the development of different resources, such as knockin/knockout and several tagging strategies to facilitate functional genomics high-throughput approaches in Neurospora. In addition, he contributed to the development of a real-time reporter platform to assist circadian studies in fungi, by setting up a fully codon-optimized luciferase system for this organism. This has proved to be an excellent reporter to track gene expression with great spatiotemporal resolution in fungi, already revealing unexpected details about the circadian clock. He also showed that band (bd), the historical mutant that had been used for over 40 years in all Neurospora circadian studies, corresponded to a point mutation in ras-1, therefore linking Ras-1 signaling and circadian output. Now he is currently interested in understanding how the temporal information is passed from the central oscillator to the hundred of genes that are under circadian control. For this he has developed a high-throughput bioluminescence screening platform to assess, by reverse and forward genetics, the impact of canonical and putative transcription factors in defining phase-specific gene expression. In addition, Dr. Larrondo has shared a long-standing interest in oxidative stress and metal homeostasis in eukaryotic systems. Thus, he has collaborated with Dr, Nibaldo Inestrosa in studies involving both oxidative stress and Alzheimer disease and also copper modulation of prion protein expression.

Physics

Antonio, as Dr. Costa-Filho is invariably known, works in the broad field of Biophysics, the use of techniques and insights from Physics to solve fundamental questions in Biology. He is an outstanding young scientist who has given important contributions to his field mainly related to: enzymes involved in tropical diseases such as Chagas’ disease and leishmaniose that affect millions of people in developing countries; molecular studies of biomembranes using modern techniques such as time-resolved electron magnetic resonance (see “Electron spin resonance in studies of membranes and proteins”, Science, 291, 266-269, 2001); introduction of site-directed spin labeling in Brazil pursuing studies on protein dynamics and lipid-protein interactions. His contributions are described in over 40 peer-reviewed papers, which have gathered around 450 citations (h index = 11). His specialty is electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and although EPR is not a new technique, it is currently undergoing something of a renaissance through the introduction of pulsed EPR, which opens time-resolved studies, and the ability to precisely label large macromolecules such as proteins and DNA with EPR-sensitive labels. Antonio learned the pulsed EPR field during his 3-year stay at Cornell University, where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Jack Freed, who is definitely one of its chief developers. Upon his return to Brazil, he put up a research group with broad scientific interests in molecular biophysics that can be generally divided in four subjects: (1) role of metal centers in enzyme activity, including processes such as electron transfer, detoxification of aromatic compounds, and the traditional heme proteins; (2) lipid-protein (lipid-peptides) interactions, aiming at the control of enzyme activity through its binding with membranes; (3) the dynamic structure of lipid membranes, exploring the idea that the membrane is no longer thought of as just an inert physical barrier that divides the cell and its compartments, but instead participates actively in a variety of biological events; (4) small molecules that act as pro-drugs and/or models for macromolecules.

Using the words of Harvard professor Jon Clardy, who once wrote Antonio a recommendation letter, he is “the sort of luminous talent and personality that comes around once every decade or so”. Although opportunities to work in leading laboratories in the US would have come up, he decided to return to Brazil contributing with his enthusiasm and knowledge for the progress of science in Brazil and in the Third World. Good facilities and choice of problems are not enough, and a flourishing scientific center needs young people with bold plans. Antonio not only represents the generation of young independent researchers who are working on their own ambitious programs, he is also the model for the generation of students behind him, a fact that can be easily grasped from his increasingly growing list of awards as best teacher of undergraduate courses taught at his institute. Antonio represents the best of modern physics and a role model for all scientists working and living in developing countries. I am absolutely convinced that he will be an incomparable TWAS affiliated member.

Mathematical Sciences

Prof. Eduardo Teixeira's researches concerns mostly on non-linear partial differential equations and their applications. A particular attention has been directed towards equations with free boundaries. Former student of professor Luis A. Caffarelli, Prof. Teixeira has hitherto made important contributions to at least four grand lines of investigations: free boundary problems, fully nonlinear equations, geometric PDEs and nonlinear analysis. A first overview on Prof. Teixeira's work reviles a fine combination of creativity and powerful techniques from a number of areas such as geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, nonlinear PDEs.  In his PhD thesis he has solved an important problem in the theory of nonlinear heat conduct. In subsequent works, he also addressed further qualitative and geometric properties of this challenging class of free boundary problems.  Singularly perturbed PDEs have been of large interest through the last two decades as models for high energy activation, such as in flame propagation theory. Prof. Teixeira has made decisive contributions to this class of problems. In particular he developed a non-variational scheme to deal with PDEs with non-zero drift terms and also described the complete limiting picture for fully nonlinear singularly PDEs of elliptic type. In collaboration with YanYan Li and Zheng-Chao Han, Prof. Teixeira has obtained an asymptotic radial symmetry result for solutions to the sigma_k Yamabe equation in punctured domains. Their work accounts an extension and an improvement of the “measure theoretic" variation of Alexandrov reflection technique due to Caffarelli, Gidas and Spruck. They also generalized the linearized operator analysis suggested by Korevaar, Mazzeo, Pacard and Schoen for the classical Yamabe problem, providing fine convergence results for the asymptotic analysis. In recent papers jointly with Lei Zhang, Teixeira established frequency formulae for free boundary problems in general Riemannian manifolds. The proof of Teixeira-Zhang monotonicity formulas are quite delicate.  They have also obtained the parabolic versions of their monotonicity formulas. Certainly one of Teixeira's most impressive contributions so far is his work with A. Swiech on fully nonlinear obstacle type problems in infinite dimensional spaces. Dr. Teixeira has also made significant contributions to more abstract problems from classical analysis: weak continuity properties of non-linear maps, Cauchy problem in locally convex spaces, general fixed point theorems, infinite order PDEs, etc. In a recent article, Teixeira and D. Pellegrino classify all norm attaining operators between classical sequence spaces. Teixeira’s first PhD student defended last November and currently he directs four other PhD students working on a variety of important and difficult subjects. Since 2008 Teixeira has been the acting vice-head of our department. He is also involved in mathematics book projects. He has hitherto written beautiful lecture notes on free boundary problems and elliptic PDE theory.

Structural, Cell and Molecular Biology

Prof. Rodrigues was hired as an assistant professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Microbiology Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) on August 2002, after a post doctoral stage under the supervision of Luiz R. Travassos (Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil). He has started an independent laboratory on August 2004 and since then his group has been working on structural and functional features of microbial lipids and polysaccharides, including unconventional secretion mechanisms of fungal macromolecules.

The main research model is the yeast-like pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, the principal causative agent of cryptococcosis. In Brazil, neurocryptococcosis is the most important cause of death in HIV patients with systemic mycoses (Prado et al., Mem Inst Oswaldo Cruz. 2009 104:513-21). In sub-Saharan Africa, the estimated number of deaths associated with cryptococcal disease is half a million per year, which is comparable with the number attributed to tuberculosis (Park et al., AIDS. 2009 23:525-30). Current anti-cryptococcal therapies are not effective.

In the Cryptococcus model, Prof. Rodrigues characterized glycosphingolipids as targets for protective antimicrobial antibodies (Rodrigues et al., Infect Immun. 2000 68:7049-60 and Clin Vaccine Immunol. 2007 14:1372-6). The characterization of glycosphingolipids as targets for anticryptococcal therapeutic agents was recently validated by the Del Poeta group in USA (PLoS One. 2011 6:e15572). In the same model, Prof. Rodrigues established new concepts correlating polysaccharide dimensions and immunogenicity (Fonseca et al., Infect Immun. 2010 78:3861-70 and Nimrichter et al., Eukaryot Cell. 2007 6:1400-10). In a close collaboration with a leading group in USA, Prof. Rodrigues also described a new mechanism of unconventional secretion in yeast cells, as detailed below.

In 2004, Prof. Rodrigues was awarded an international fellowship for Latin investigators from ASM to travel to the laboratory of Arturo Casadevall at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM), Bronx, N.Y. A direct consequence of this visit was the discovery of vesicular transport pathway in fungi that is similar to mammalian exosomes (Rodrigues et al., Eukaryot Cell. 2007 6:48-59 and Eukaryot Cell. 2008 7:58-67). They have found that this is a complex biological event that includes the release of vesicles to the extracellular space (Oliveira et al., PLoS One. 2010 Jun 14;5(6):e11113.). To date, the collaboration involving Prof. Rodrigues´ laboratory and that headed by Prof. Arturo Casadevall have resulted in the publication of 24 peer-reviewed scientific articles, one book chapter and two journal covers. More importantly, the collaboration between their groups has promoted a major international scientific exchange in which AECOM and Brazilian researchers have visited each other and which has expanded to include other research groups in projects that cover different aspects of fungal biology.

Under the supervision of Prof. Rodrigues, three students defended their PhD theses in the last two years. Two of them remain with him as postdoctoral fellows. Prof. Rodrigues currently maintain collaborations with groups from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, University of Texas (El-Paso, USA), Center for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona), University of Gdansk Technology (Poland) and many Brazilian institutions.