Tiago Brandão Rodrigues
Minister of Education, In charge of Youth Ministery of Education
Tiago Brandão Rodrigues (Braga, 1977) is the Portuguese Minister of Education, Sports and Youth. He was elected MP in 2015, representing the Viana do Castelo constituency.
He obtained a BSc in Biochemistry (2000) and a PhD in Molecular Biophysics (2007). His PhD project was collaboratively performed in Dallas, Madrid and Coimbra and was mainly dedicated to the study of cerebral metabolism using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. His thesis won the António Xavier Prize in 2008.
In 2010, he moved to the Cancer Research UK Institute (University of Cambridge) with a special interest in the development of imaging methods that can be used in the clinic to detect early tumour responses to treatment. His research was sponsored by the European Commission, through the Marie Curie Program and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
He is member of several international scientific societies and author of many articles published in specialized journals, such as Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Cancer Research. His 2013 article about a novel technique to evaluate the effectiveness of cancer treatments published in Nature Medicine was awarded with the British Prize of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He was invited speaker in international conferences and in postgraduate programmes.
He was member of the editorial board of scientific journals and reviewer of articles, as well as evaluator of renowned international scientific funding agencies.
He was a trustee of the Portuguese Association of Researchers and Students in the UK, where he developed work in science communication.
He was the Portuguese Olympic attaché during the 2012 Olympic Games in London.