Luís
Saraiva 
Bio:
Luis Saraiva graduated in Biology from the University of Evora and the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Portugal. He then became a Fellow of the International Graduate School in Genetics and Functional Genomics of the University of Cologne (Germany), where he received his PhD in Genetics (summa cum laude), in 2008. Funded by the Boheringer-Ingelheim Foundation, he spent a brief period as a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School. As a postdoc with Nobel Laureate Linda Buck at the Fred Hutch (Seattle, USA), he investigated the molecular basis of olfaction and how such environmental cues can modulate behavior and physiology and be translated into perception. In 2013, he became an EBI–Sanger Postdoctoral (ESPOD) Fellow, in Cambridge (UK). There he pioneered the use of RNA-sequencing technologies to study how evolution or genetic variation shape the size and function of gene repertoires involved in vertebrate olfaction and investigated the molecular identity and heterogeneity of different olfactory neuronal populations. With the Sanger Early Career Innovation Award, he extended these studies to hypothalamic neuronal populations regulating appetite, and later to other systems. Importantly, he helped develop a high-throughput method that allows the identification of the spatial origin of cells assayed by single-cell RNA-sequencing within a tissue of interest. This is one of the foundational studies in the nascent field of spatial transcriptomics. Since October 2015 he is a Principal Investigator at Sidra Medicine (Qatar), and in June 2016 he also became an Adjunct Assistant Member at the Monell Chemical Senses Center (USA).
