Evolutionary and Comparative Neuroendocrinology

Prof. Valery Grinevich is known for his studies on neuropeptide signaling in the brain. He obtained his MD degree in 1992 at the Kursk State Medical University (USSR/Russia) with specialization in neurology and psychiatry. His PhD thesis was defended in 1996 on a subject of evolutionary and comparative neuroanatomy of oxytocin and vasopressin systems in vertebrates at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint-Petersburg (supervisor: Prof. Andrey L. Polenov). Thereafter, as a winner of Russian President Mr. Boris Yeltsin's award, he did his first postdoc with Profs. Fernand Labrie and George Pelletier in Quebec on hypothalamic mechanisms of the stress response. Next, he joined the team of Greti Aguilera at NIH to work on neuro-immuno-endocrine interactions. In 2001, as an awardee of the Alexandre von Humboldt fellowship, he joined Prof. Gustav Jirikowski's group in Jena for two years, focusing on morphological alterations of human hypothalamic neurons afflicted by various pathologies. In 2003 he was appointed as a Full University Professor at the Moscow State Medical University, but resigned this offer, starting his next postdoc training at the Max Plank Institute for Medical Research Heidelberg with the father of modern neuroscience and neuroendocrinology, Prof. Peter H. Seeburg. In 2008 he established his own group in Seeburg's Department, achieving cell-type specific tagging of OT neurons by viral vectors and deciphered a novel mechanism of neuropeptide signaling in the brain via axonal release. In 2012, as a winner of the Chica and Heinz Schaller Research Foundation Award, he became the Head of an independent Group on Neuropeptides allocated at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the University of Heidelberg. From May 1st 2019 he has been promoted for a Full University Professor (W3) position at the University of Heidelberg and a Head of Department of Neuropeptide Research in Psychiatry at the Central Institute of Mental Health. From March 2020, he is Affiliate Professor at the Center for Neuroinflammation at the Neuroscience Institute, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA. In 2022, Valery Grinevich was awarded by the Synergy ERC and the German-Israel Excellence Research Program (DIP) grants, both of which he is coordinating.

Rui Oliveira is Full Professor and Chair of the Neuroscience and Behavior at ISPA - University Institute for Psychological Social and Life sciences, and Head of the Laboratory for Integrative Behavioral Biology at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, in Lisbon, Portugal. He obtained his PhD in Biology in 1996 with a study on the neuroendocrinology of social dominance in cichlid fish, and after a post-doc in the laboratory of Prof. Peter McGregor at the University of Nottingham, to study animal communication networks, he became a faculty member at ISPA, where he served as Dean from 2010 to 2020. He is also an active science communicator, having organized a science exhibition about the brain for a general audience ("Brain: wider than the sky", 2019, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon) which attracted over 85,000 visitors, and recorded a Gulbenkian Masterclass video series on the brain. He has also been an active member of the research community, having served in different bodies of several scientific societies (Portuguese Ethological Society, Association for the Study of Animal Behavior, Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology), including as President of the Society for Social Neuroscience. His main research interests are focused on the evolutionary neurobiology of social behavior and research agenda is focused in an integrative approach to the study of social behavior, which combines the study of proximate causes (gene modules, hormones, neural circuits, cognitive processes) and ultimate effects (evolutionary consequences). In particular, he aims to understand how brain and behavior can be shaped by the social environment and how the cognitive, neural and genetic mechanisms underlying plasticity in the expression of social behavior have evolved. During his career, he made significant contributions to different areas of behavioral neuroendocrinology, working mainly with teleost fish as study models. First, he focused on the social modulation of androgens and its adaptive function. He then, investigated the neuroendocrine mechanisms involved in the evolution of reproductive plasticity in fish, in particular the occurrence of alternative reproductive tactics within males. He then became interested in the vasotocin/ oxytocin nonapeptide family as a neuroendocrine toolkit for the evolution of social behavior, and he has been investigating the role of oxytocin on the development and evolution of social behavior in zebrafish and cichlid fishes, and how this system may have been coopted to regulate also interspecific interactions, using the cleaner wrasse marine mutualism as a model system.