Prof. Duarte Barral completed the Degree in Microbiology and Genetics in 1997 from the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences and the PhD in Cell Biology in 2003 from Imperial College London. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School until he took a position as Principal Investigator of the Membrane Traffic in Disease at the Chronic Diseases Research Center (CEDOC) from NOVA Medical School, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in 2009. 

He is currently an Associate Professor at the same School. Duarte Barral has been working in the field of membrane traffic and its regulation by GTPases of the Rab and Arf families for 20 years. 

He has helped uncover the previously unknown role of several of these proteins, namely Rab27a (Stinchcombe et al., J Cell Biol., 2001; Hume et al., Traffic, 2002), Arl8b (Garg et al, Immunity, 2011), Arl13b (Barral et al, PNAS, 2012; Casalou et al., J. Cell Sci., 2014; Casalou et al., Cancers, 2019) and Rab35 (Kuhns et al., EMBO Rep., 2019), and established that Rab isoforms can be functionally redundant by studying Rab27a and Rab27b in the pigmentary disorder Griscelli syndrome (Barral et al., J Clin. Invest., 2002). 

Duarte Barral has a solid track record in attracting competitive funding (>2.75 M€ of funding for projects as PI) and successfully running research projects (10 funded projects successfully concluded). Moreover, he published 39 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and has a strong publication track record: h-index 26 (Web of Science/Scopus)/ 27 (Google Scholar) and a total of 2311 citations (Web of Science/Scopus)/ 3275 (Google Scholar). Furthermore, Duarte Barral has an extensive experience in supervision (10 post-doctoral fellows, 9 PhD students and 8 Master students who completed their training under his supervision). 

Finally, Duarte Barral has experience in coordinating teams and consortia, as evidenced by several publications as co-last author with researchers from different countries, the integration in projects involving collaborations and the coordination of a Twinning project, with two other European institutions.” 

At the 2023 Longevity Med Summit will introduce the topic “Harnessing lysosome dysfunction in cellular ageing”