It was a joy to organize and lecture this new edition of the BIODIV Advanced Course “Museum Techniques in the 21st Century” .

It was a challenge, since it is the first edition at his new home, MUHNAC, the National Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon.

It was also great to interact with the team of taxidermists of MUHNAC, Pedro Andrade and Ana Campos, that shared their knowledge and experience on preparing vertebrate specimens.

The students and teachers, posing at the iconic palm tree pathway at MUHNAC

The sub-Director, Judite Alves, introducing the MUHNAC to the students

Working out how to retrieve genomic material from mammal bones

The taxidermy lab as busy as it gets

Visiting the museum reserves, with the help of the resident curators

The birds and mammals that were prepared during the course

A lively viva on a subject that I really like to talk about, scientific illustrations! What an incredible day revisiting my alma mater, the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Coimbra!

I had the privilege of being invited to argue on the Diogo Santos’ PhD viva, where he brilliantly defended his thesis, “ESTEPÁRIAS “Em Risco”: O Papel da Ilustração Científica na Conservação das Aves Estepárias em Portugal.” Huge congratulations to Diogo and his supervisors, Fernando Correia (University of Aveiro, Portugal) and João Paulo Silva (BIOPOLIS, University of Porto), who kindly invited me.

It was also a joy to reconnect with Fernando, that I worked a long time ago in an educational project funded by the Ministry of Education to provide multimedia contents in the internet about birds for Secondary Schools. Such a nostalgic and heartwarming experience!

Diogo, his supervisors, and the jury, all beaming with joy after an outstanding MSc viva, where Diogo earned the maximum grade for his thesis

I am very proud that Nadito Barbosa won one of the funding grants from CE3C to assist PhD programs that do not have a project to sponsor their work. It is also an example of the power the community, in this case, the researchers and professors affiliated to CE3C, that voted on the best three projects.

Congratulations to the three PhD candidates, that won each, near 4,000 euros for their PhD projects.

A great meeting, representing MUHNAC, where researchers showed how advanced is the application of marine resources biobanks for applied investment on innovation and industrial development in Portugal.

A great hub devoted to biobank Portuguese marine resources.

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.

The iconic facade of the MUHNAC

Carla is a PhD student on Veterinary Medicine from the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of 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.

These images will be used to test the machine learning approaches that are being developed under the WIMANET COST Action objectives.

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 the first half of March, every Saturday, the Little Naturalists explored the world of birds at the Biodiversity Hall and Botanical Garden of the University of Porto. They delved into the fascinating universe of birds, observing and describing their diverse features: beaks, feet, wings, feathers, scales, and eggs in all colors, shapes, and sizes. They also studied bird anatomy, behavior, and their remarkable, sometimes surprising vocalizations. Through engaging games, they learned how to classify birds into groups based on shared characteristics. Alongside species observed in the U.Porto Botanical Garden, they explored preserved specimens from MHNC-UP’s collections.

Birds and the amazing small naturalists.