During one week, at the lovely landscape of Mértola city, we taught at the PhD Advanced Course “Conservation Genetics: fundaments and applications”, organized by my former coleagues Paulo Célio alves, Soraia Barbosa from the University of Porto. I joined a team of invited teachers, along Matthew P. Hare and Jeremy Searle from Cornell University.

My talks on Conservation Breeding and Genetic Monitoring.

It is with extreme pleasure that I join the team of curators of the MUHNAC - National Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon as Bird Curator. These avian collections hold extraordinary collections from Portugal and from several PALOP countries.

A major institution on Europe, with centuries of knowledge to curate for the future .

Carla is a PhD student at Veterinary Medicine at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. While she is waiting for her PhD defense, she visited our lab and helped us optimizing our protocols for digitizing large images of avian blood smears.

We were glad to host Carla Culda during this short stay, where she enjoyed some of the Portuguese culture and helped us advancing methodologies on avian malaria curation.

During two days we taught an introductory online course on genomics of malaria parasites. From NGS technologies, to Command Line introduction, all the way to pipelines to assemble genomes of malaria parasites.

Tired but happy teachers and students, after two days looking at genomic data and pipelines.

During several days, we organized an workshop to analyse the data already colected for the first Breeding Bird Atlas of Cabo Verde. At Rui Vaz, in the interior of Santiago island, members of all NGOs that collaborate in this project shared their experiences and prepared for the next season of data collection.

The whole team relaxing at Rui Vaz. Hany Alonso from SPEA is making the photo

Nadito Barbosa won a PhD grant from Portuguese National Science Agency (FCT). He will focus on enhancing the power of passive acoustic to monitor biodiversity in Cabo Verde, working closely with the NGOs from each island and complementing the ongoing Bird Atlas of Cabo Verde.

We are glad to have Nadito joining our team, and starting his PhD at FCUL.

It was a great day, visiting my alma mater institution, the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra.

I was happy to be a part of the PhD Viva of Sara Mendes, that defended her PhD in Ecology thesis “Seed dispersal networks in the Antropocene”. Congratulations also to the supervisors, Jen M. Olesen (Univ. de Aarhus, Dinamarca) and Ruben Heleno (University of Coimbra). It was also a great time to see again many of my dearest coleagues and friends in Coimbra.

Sara looking very happy after being granted the maxiumm classification for her PhD.