Steve Portugal
Current position: Lecturer in Molecular Biosciences, University of Kent
I graduated from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB, Spain) with a BSc specializing in Genetics in June 2006. During my final year project, I became interested in how species evolve and adapt to different environments through changes in their genomes, and this has been my main line of research ever since. For this reason, I went on to purse a MSc on cytogenetics and chromosome evolution in the same university from 2006 to 2008. During this period, I was awarded a 3-months travel fellowship at the University of Bari (Italy) to learn new cytogenetic techniques. Although cytogenetics is still a very commonly used methodology, I realized that if I wanted to understand how species’ genomes changed over time, I needed new approaches with higher resolution. And that’s why when I started my PhD project in 2008 I moved to genomics and bioinformatics. To improve my skills, I obtained a 9-months travel fellowship at a state-of-the-art lab at Yale University (USA). I finished my PhD on 2012, and in the following month I moved to Aberystwyth University (UK) to start my postdoc. This first postdoc allowed me to increase my bioinformatics knowledge and to work within an international team of computational and evolutionary biologists.
After a year at Aberystwyth University, the lab moved to the RVC on September 2013. During this time at the RVC, I developed not only my technical skills thanks to my PI and the RVC’s development programme, but also, I was incredibly lucky to be part of the Researcher Association for three years. This exposed me to areas not directly related to research where I didn’t have any kind of experience, such as admin, organizing workshops, seating in several committees, that prepared me for my current role.
In my current position as a Lecturer in Molecular Biosciences at the University of Kent, I combine research with my own research group, teaching and admin, requiring skills and knowledge that I developed and improved during my time at the RVC. I am always open to helping with advice to other researchers in progressing with their careers.