Miguel Paço, MSc

My name is Miguel Paço and I am a neuroscience PhD student at the Champalimaud Foundation. During my undergraduate degree years, I found a fascination with organic chemistry which led me to join the Organic Chemistry Labs, at IST, to work on the synthesis of novel organic polymers. Later, during my master’s course, I become curious on how cells interact to generate behaviour. This led me to try the field of neuroscience by joining the Vision to Action Lab at the Champalimaud Foundation for a summer internship. While in this lab I got the opportunity to work with state-of-the-art optic techniques to question how neurons would transmit and process information into behaviour. Ultimately, I would end up developing my master thesis on this lab. With my master’s degree completed, I knew I wanted to continue my academic career in the field of neuroscience. Therefore, in 2018, I joined the Champalimaud Foundation International Neuroscience Doctoral Program. During this program I became fascinated with pursuit behaviour. Quickly being able to react to your environment is beneficial for survival. This becomes paramount if you are trying to pursue a moving target following an unknown path. Such a situation is the case for when a male fruit fly chases a female during courtship. What fascinates me about the fly courtship pursuit is that the male reacts faster to the female motion than his brain should be able to, given what we know about the fly brain. Therefore, in 2019, and in the context of the PhD program, I joined the Sensorimotor Integration Lab (Chiappe Lab) where I am currently developing my PhD in understanding the high performance behind the fruit fly courtship pursuit.