BIOSOCIOCOG · Oxytocin and Dopamine Interplay in Humans – on the Biology of Social Cognition

Oxytocin and Dopamine Interplay in Humans – on the Biology of Social Cognition

The Biomedical Neuroscience Lab’s (dpratalab.wordpress.com) mission, I seeded in 2015 thanks to an Marie Curie CIG, is to foster the understanding of the biological underpinnings of social human behaviour and, with it, improve etiological and translational models in neurology and psychiatry. Using neuroscience, we want to highlight the importance of the social dimension of our lives for our personal and societal well-being, and to enhance it in health and disease – as well as in our day-to-day research lab life. It is the first of its kind in Portugal, in its interdisciplinarity and innovativeness, and its co-spin-off company (NeuroPsyAI) in the world, in terms of its proposed solution – both for which I won the 2017 3rd Marie Curie Prize in ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’. Upon arrival from 12 years of training (from PhD to Lectureship in King’s College London, KCL) in the UK, I realized the biomedical neuroscience research I got trained in, and had just acquired FCT/EC funds to pursue in Portugal, was unprecedented in the country, and thus starting conditions were severely scarce. I spent the first 2/3yrs setting up the needed infrastructure (namely, collaborative and scientific culture in the Portuguese medical arena, ethics, facilities, equipment and team recruitment and training) to be able to conduct the cutting-edge project grants I had been awarded. The inevitable trade-off of such impactful opening of precedents was an initially lower publication output, than at the well-welded research context of KCL. As such, contingency plans were put in place and have resulted so far in 11 last-author original articles + 5 reviews, and 6 as collaborator. The lab’s own data collections finally kicked-off in 2017/8, and recently started to give fruits in (2 articles, one in Scientific Reports), and 4 under review. The lab (currently 25 people) has now greatly increased its data collection, publication speed and (inter)national researchers/students attraction. We are now the most interdisciplinary neuroscience team I know in Portugal, from engineers to MDs to psychologists to anthropologist, seamlessly co-learning, half international, and employing a wide range of techniques (from MRI, EEG, pupillometry, ECG, EMG, SCR, to genetics). This is the result of my creation of a multi-valanced synergy between my current 4 affiliations: IBEB-FCUL (engineering), ISCTE-IUL (psychology), KCL-UK (neuroimaging) and NeuroPsyAI, Ltd (artificial intelligence); and 6 Portuguese hospitals, 1 pharmacy, 1 GP clinic, while maintaining ~5 valuable national and 5 international collaborations (NIMH, KCL, Emory Univ., Munich Univ, and Maastricht Univ.) - which has allowed projects to, although with delay, grow ambitiously and attract cross-field teaching invitations, several (~65) national media appearances, and funding of €1,040K from the EU/FCT/Bial/Caixa Capital.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union