Carlos Rodrigues

Background

About Carlos Rodrigues

I am a Medical Doctor and Biologist with a PhD in Biosciences and a specialization in Cellular and Molecular Biology. I collect more than a decade of experience working in cancer cell biology and almost five years of clinical practice. As a speaker of both the medical and the scientific languages, I seek to combine these two worlds and work in the interphase between the clinics and the bench. I obtained my PhD in Biology in 2014 from the University of Coimbra. In my doctoral studies, I dissected the mechanisms of cancer stem cells' formation through the dedifferentiation of terminally differentiated cells and identified IL-6, G-CSF and Activin-A as drivers of the overall process. My work mainly was cell-culture based, and I used both primary and continuous cell lines cultured in 2D, 3D or co-culture models. I also used animal models to study tumorigenesis and assess cells' metastatic ability. Finally, I looked at cellular senescence as a mediator of malignant transformation. During my first post-doc, I dug deeper into the signalling pathways involved in cellular dedifferentiation and tested different approaches to block cancer stem cells’ formation. Between 2009 and 2017, along with my supervisor, Prof. Carmen Alpoim, we organized an annual Master's course in Molecular Oncobiology, in which I taught three theoretical and all practical classes. In 2018, I began my career as a medical doctor working as a general intern at Coimbra's University Hospital (Portugal) and, in the following year, I started a residency program in Internal Medicine at Aveiro's Hospital (Portugal). Driven by my passion for combining science and medicine, in 2021, I relocated to Sweden to initiate a second post-doc in paediatric neuro-oncology at Karolinska Institutet. My work focuses on the mechanisms of radiotherapy-induced late-onset cognitive impairment in paediatric brain cancer survivors, and I am currently involved in more than ten different projects ranging from studying the mechanisms of radiation-induced neuroinflammation to testing different potential therapies to ameliorate or even prevent radiotherapy-associated cognitive impairment. I work mostly with rodent models and use a combination of high-throughput technologies like single-cell RNA sequencing and conventional approaches such as behaviour testing and electrophysiology assessments to approach my scientific questions. I am co-supervisor of three PhD students and the main supervisor of two master's students and one undergraduate student.