Adam was one of the investigators who helped shape the early days of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown and the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme.

He was an innovator in the truest sense: a scientist who built microscopes, created tools like Bonsai and Harp, and pushed the boundaries of what could be done through radical collaboration. He brought joy, curiosity, and generosity to every interaction, and he had an extraordinary gift for bringing people together.

Even after moving to London, Adam kept a special and enduring connection to the Champalimaud Foundation.

Vision is central to how humans navigate the world, whether recognizing a familiar face in a photo or driving to a family dinner. For Artificial Intelligence (AI), however, even minor visual distortions, such as changes in brightness, contrast, or subtle perturbations, can cause object recognition algorithms to fail. Bridging this performance gap has been a major challenge in machine learning.

Today, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of its latest Consolidator Grants call, the second level of this type of funding, for researchers with consolidated work in their fields. Two new life science projects in Portugal secured a combined total of €4.1M. These grants were awarded to Juan Álvaro Gallego, who recently joined the CF, and Ricardo Araújo from Instituto Superior Técnico / Centro de Recursos Naturais e Ambiente (CERENA) .

Over the past couple of months we transformed words, images and sounds into a collection of stories that reflects the spirit of our community.

These are stories of curiosity, courage and trust.
Reconstructions of the past and exercises in imagining the future.
They reflect different cultures, languages and ways of thinking which, together, broaden how we observe and understand the world.

Host

Klaas van Gisbergen, PhD, Tissue Immunity Lab

Venue

Seminar room

The Champalimaud Foundation (CF) has the advantage of housing a research institute and a clinic under the same roof. Collaboration opportunities are everywhere, and from the start Henrique Veiga-Fernandes made the most of them. He's been linking research and clinic, collaborating with health professionals, and hopes to expand these while inspiring others to do the same.

When Maria João Cardoso arrived at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) in 2011, the building was almost empty. “There was almost no one there”, she recalls. “It was a ghost institution that progressively came to life”.

The Champalimaud Foundation installed a new 18-Tesla horizontal-bore MRI scanner, custom-built in Germany at the Pre-Clinical MRI Lab, a team led by Principal Investigator Noam Shemesh. The system is the strongest horizontal-bore MRI scanner constructed to date and is currently the only one of its kind.

“This is the most powerful system in the world for in-vivo imaging,” says Shemesh. “By combining an exceptionally strong magnetic field with signal-boosting cryogenic coils, this equipment enables capabilities that have not been available before.”