Ricardo Azevedo was born in Lisbon in the 3^rd of November 1970. His area of research is Evolutionary Biology, particularly in mechanisms involved in the evolution of development and complexity; he works with the laboratory model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm, as well as with theoretical and computational models of biological systems.

Since January 2003 he has been an assistant professor (tenure track) at the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at University of Houston, where he teaches Evolutionary Biology and Evolution of Development.

Ricardo Azevedo got his Licenciatura (first degree) in Biology at the Faculdade de Ciências of Universidade de Lisboa from 1988 to 1992.  Over the following five years (1992–7), with a mixture of Portuguese and UK government funding, he conducted his doctoral research in Evolutionary Biology at the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology of University of Edinburgh, UK (Thesis Title: “Thermal evolution of body size in Drosophila melanogaster”.) His supervisors combined the two biological disciplines that have fascinated him ever since: Linda Partridge (evolutionary biology) and Vernon French (developmental biology). Part of his PhD work was carried out at the Department of Biology of the University College London, UK (1994–7), where he later took a temporary lectureship in biostatistics for one year (1997–8).

Between 1998 and 2001 he moved to the Department of Biology of the Imperial College London at Silwood Park, UK, where he did his first postdoc on the emerging field of evolution of development and growth of nematodes, under the supervision of Armand Leroi.  This work was funded by a Portuguese government fellowship and allowed Ricardo Azevedo to develop some of the central interests and approaches that drive his research to this day.

In 2001 he did another postdoc, this time at the agrochemical company Syngenta in Jealott’s Hill International Research Center in Bracknell, UK, where he helped develop high-throughput drug screening using free-living nematodes.  

In 2002, he moved to the Department of Molecular Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, USA to do his final postdoc on the evolution of mail tail development in Caenorhabditis elegans (Supervisor: Scott Emmons) with an EMBO scholarship.  This postdoc was cut short when the University of Houston made him a permanent offer.

Since the beginning of his career Ricardo Azevedo has published 18 papers in scientific journals with peer review, half of which as first author.

Throughout his scientific career his movements have been driven primarily by a combination of scientific and financial considerations, except the first change from the University of Edinburgh to the University College London that was determined by his supervisor Linda Partridge.

He is an independent researcher and at the moment he has only one project funded by the University of Houston through his startup funds and an additional internal grant (USD $29,259).  He has three PhD students under his supervision.

His scientific dream is to contribute to the emergence of a theory of evolution that includes explicit references to developmental mechanisms. Currently his principal aims are to understand how phenotypic variation is generated and how it influences the course of evolution. He adds, “I am particularly interested in how cell lineage variability evolves in different groups of animals”.

He believes he is mostly known in the scientific community by his recent work on the evolution of lineage complexity and on evolution of robustness and directional epistasis as a function of the sexual reproduction.  He is still actively pursuing these interests.

Since he started at the University of Houston, Ricardo Azevedo says he has not been invited to return to Portugal.  

razevedo at uh.edu

Representative publications:

• Azevedo RBR, Lohaus R, Srinivasan S, Dang KK & Burch CL. Sexual reproduction selects for robustness and negative epistasis in artificial gene networks. Nature 440: 87–90.

• Azevedo RBR, Lohaus R, Braun V, Gumbel M, Umamaheshwar M, Agapow PM, Houthoofd W, Platzer U, Borgonie G, Meinzer HP & Leroi AM (2005) The simplicity of metazoan cell lineages. Nature 433: 152–156.

• Zhang H, Azevedo RBR, Lints R, Doyle C, Teng Y, Haber D & Emmons SW (2003) Global regulation of Hox gene expression in C. elegans by a SAM-domain protein. Developmental Cell 4: 903–915.

• Azevedo RBR, Keightley PD, Laurén-Määttä C, Vassilieva LL, Lynch M & Leroi AM (2002) Spontaneous mutational variation for body size in Caenorhabditis elegans. Genetics 162: 755–765.

• Azevedo RBR & Leroi AM (2001) A power law for cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98: 5699–5704.

• Cunha A, Azevedo RBR, Emmons SW & Leroi AM (1999) Variable cell number in nematodes. Nature 402: 253–253.