Rui Costa

FLAD and the Portuguese Scientists in America

Rui Costa

Rui Costa was born in Guarda, Portugal, on the 15th of July 1972.

He works in the area of Neuroscience, and he is interested in understanding the biological basis of behavior, “especially how we learn and remember”, he says. His current scientific projects are focused on understanding how we learn new actions, and how we perform particular actions to achieve the goals we want.

Presently he is Chief of the Section for In Vivo Neural Function of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, MD, USA.

Between 1990 and 1996, he attended the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, and achieved the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. After this, he went to Swedeen where he worked an academic year (1996/97) as a final internship and guest researcher at the Department of Animal Environment and Health in the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Skara.

He then enrolled into the GABBA Doctoral Program and took his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences, from 1997 to 2002 at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), USA and Abel Salazar Biomedical Institute, University of Porto, Portugal.

From 1998 to 2002 he was a graduate student, at Alcino Silva's laboratory at the Departments of Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology of UCLA. And from 2002 to 2005, he had a position as Postdoctoral Fellow in Miguel Nicolelis laboratory at the Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center (USA)

Rui Costa says he went to the United States in 1998 to do his Ph.D. in Alcino Silva’s laboratory, supported with a scholarship from the Portuguese FCT. “I entered the GABBA doctoral program from the University of Porto in 1997, and after a year of classes in Porto we had to choose a laboratory to perform our Ph.D. work. I chose to come to the United States because at the time the main research centers in neuroscience were in the USA, and in particular centers aiming to study the biology of learning and memory”. He adds that it was a phenomenal time of development and brainstorming in neuroscience, since his arrival coincided with the doubling of the budget for biomedical research in the US.

To date, he has written about 25 scientific manuscripts, of which 15 are research papers and the others are scientific reviews, opinion papers, and monographies. He was the first author in 14 of the 25.

He came to the United States in 1998 to Alcino Silva’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has chosen that laboratory because he wanted to study the molecular and cellular basis of learning and memory, and Alcino Silva was the first to generate a mutation in a brain protein, which affected learning and memory. In 2002 he moved to Miguel Nicolelis laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina to study neuroscience at the systems level by recording the activity of many neurons in different brain regions during learning. Miguel Nicolelis was a pioneer in using this type of neuronal recordings to study brain function.

In the beginning of 2006 he moved to the National Institutes of Health to establish his laboratory, where all these different techniques to study the molecular, cellular and systems mechanisms underlying learning and memory are integrated, so they can understand how we learn new actions, and how we perform particular actions to achieve the goals we want.

Currently Rui Costa is the principal investigator and chief of his section at the NIH and has a section budget to perform research. They have three main question or projects, but the funding is all provided from the National Institutes of Health.

His ultimate goal would be to be able to identify a circuit responsible for a particular behavior - even if it is a simple action or decision. Rui Costa says “I would love to know what molecules and cells are involved; how they interact to generate the behavior; and to be able to correct it in brain disorders”.

The most known line of his research is probably the work he did with Alcino Silva investigating the mechanisms underlying the learning disabilities in neurofibromatosis type I (NF1), the most common single-gene disorder causing learning disabilities in humans. At that time, they showed that the learning deficits associated with NF1 are likely caused by increased activity of a protein called Ras and that can be reversed in the adult by manipulations that reduce the activity of this protein.

They also found that increased Ras activity leads to enhanced pre-synaptic release of GABA, which increases the threshold for induction of synaptic plasticity in the brain. This work was distinguished with several prestigious awards since it had important implications for the development of therapeutic strategies for the learning disabilities associated with NF1 and also for understanding the mechanisms by which we learn and remember. Also, it had an important impact on the usage of animal models to investigate cognitive deficits, being mentioned in an address to the U.S. Congress by Dr. Fred Gage – then President of the Society for Neuroscience – as one of the four most promising studies in neuroscience of human disease models.

 Rui Costa’s recent work while investigating the changes in neuronal coordination in Parkinson’s disease has also attracted some attention.

He has already been invited to return to Portugal, and says he was offered good conditions for his individual laboratory, with adequate funds and space for the Portuguese and European reality. Although, these conditions were still inferior to the average conditions in the United States. Rui Costa says lack of financial support was not the reason why he did not return, instead, “the lack of long term plans and clearly established goals at the institutional level, i.e. a plan to make a center with various groups that can generate critical mass and establish a school. I would love to come back to be a part of something larger than my own laboratory”, he stresses.


AWARDS

2003 - Finalist of the 2003 Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience, DC.
2001 to 2002 - Young Investigator Award from the National Neurofibromatosis Foundation, NY
2001 - NF Prize for Research Ideas from the National Neurofibromatosis Foundation, NY

costarui at mail.nih.gov

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