Dr. Rita Teodoro
Assistant Professor & Principal Investigator, NOVA Medical School
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
PhD, University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Rita Teodoro has wanted to be a scientist for as long as she can remember. Science was an integral part of her childhood and family life—as a seven-year-old, she would often visit the lab where her grandmother worked as a chemical engineer. Her interest in neuroscience, however, came much later during her PhD, when a casual conversation sparked her curiosity about neuronal signaling, both within and between cells. This curiosity has grown and flourished in the years since and has driven Rita into a career in neuroscience. Today, she leads the Neuronal Growth & Plasticity Lab as a Principal Investigator at NOVA Medical School in Lisbon, Portugal, where her team studies how neurons, glia, and surrounding tissues integrate intrinsic and extrinsic signals to orchestrate synaptic plasticity during development, neurodegeneration, and recovery.
Inspired by her grandmother, Rita began her undergraduate studies at NOVA University in Lisbon in applied chemistry and biotechnology. During her B.Sc. degree, she found herself unexpectedly fascinated by a lecture on genetics in a bio-ethics class. To explore this further and broaden her experience outside of Portugal, Rita arranged an Erasmus exchange in Paris, studying the genetics of bacteriophages. There, she discovered that she loved the process of doing scientific research—reading and developing ideas, designing experiments, working in the lab to solve interesting problems—which reaffirmed her desire to pursue a PhD. After returning to Portugal, Rita got accepted to the Gulbenkian PhD Program in Biology and Medicine, a training initiative that exposed students to an international scientific environment. “That program really opened my eyes,” Rita says. “We spent a year listening to researchers from all over the world. It broadened my sense of what science could be.”
After a year of advanced courses, students had the opportunity and funding to find a suitable lab for their thesis work anywhere in the world. Rita decided to join the lab of Dr. Patrick O’Farrell at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). At the time, the lab was moving in a new direction studying how cells respond to hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation. Given her interest in genetics, Rita decided to use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism, which offered a remarkable biological puzzle. Under low, or even no oxygen, Drosophila embryos don’t die—rather, they enter a state of “suspended animation” where development is brought to a complete halt but can be readily resumed when oxygen becomes available again, even after several days. Rita’s work showed that nitric oxide (NO), a gaseous signaling molecule, was critical for the reversible shutdown of transcription and translation processes, essentially freezing embryonic development in place. Rita showed that introducing NO alone could trigger a reversible arrest of protein turnover and gene expression, while adding a scavenger of NO prevented this arrest even under hypoxia and reduced hypoxia tolerance. These experiments indicated nitric oxide was both necessary and sufficient as a signaling factor in triggering the cellular response to hypoxia.
Rita remembers her time at UCSF as exhilarating, even as she overcame the early challenges of rebuilding familiarity and community in a new country. The lab environment was very supportive, and her PhD supervisor gave students wide intellectual freedom, an approach Rita has carried into her own mentoring philosophy today. She learned early on not to treat failed experiments as negative experiences, but rather as opportunities with new problems to solve, with explorations of technical solutions or new hypotheses. She also enjoyed the lively and collaborative scientific community at UCSF that exposed her to new ideas across biological disciplines. Over conversations with a neighboring lab working on neuronal synapses, Rita became increasingly interested in molecular aspects of neuronal signaling and development and decided to pivot into neuroscience after her PhD.
During her postdoc search, Rita visited neuroscience labs working on different model organisms. Fruit flies still offered unparalleled genetic and molecular tools, even compared to fish and C. elegans, as well as a sufficiently complex behavioral repertoire and shared ancestry with vertebrate nervous systems; moreover, Rita confesses that she felt uncomfortable working with mammalian species like rodents, despite valuing their strengths. In the end, Rita stuck with Drosophila, which remains her model organism of choice to date. “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,” she quips even as she encourages early career researchers to be equally deliberate about finding the right alignment of their methodological and scientific interests. Rita moved to the lab of Dr. Thomas Schwarz at Harvard Medical School to study neuronal regulation of synaptic plasticity. She wanted to focus on the intracellular trafficking machinery that supported the structural remodeling happening at dynamically changing synapses. She identified the exocyst complex, present in every cell not just neurons, as a major hub that integrates messages from different signaling molecules. This complex then recruits other messengers to orchestrate cellular events, including the regulation of cytoskeletal restructuring, exocytosis, and directing vesicles to the membrane during synaptic remodeling. During her postdoc, working on many projects in parallel and finding the space to develop her independent research vision, she felt that she really came into her own as a scientist.
When Rita and her partner began searching for faculty positions, they were also looking for a way back to Europe so that her two young kids could grow up closer to their grandparents and extended family. Everything seemed to align perfectly when they were both offered principal investigator positions with the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology), a scheme designed to recruit scientific talent and early-career researchers to Portugal. Starting alongside other junior faculty at a new institute, Rita and her colleagues had the opportunity to shape everything from the ground up, from the fly facilities to their lab spaces, although it meant it took more time to get established. Rita’s lab focuses on molecular mechanisms involved in neuronal growth and plasticity, including intracellular and inter-cellular signaling as well as gene regulation. Rita continues to embrace new ideas and welcomes diverse approaches in pursuit of a deeper understanding of synaptic plasticity.
One of the lab’s current directions is studying the 3D micro-environment at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), and how neurons, muscle cells, glia and the extracellular matrix all communicate to establish synapses that maintain proper control of muscular function. Their early work showed that mechanical pressure, generated by contraction of surrounding muscle tissue, was directly “sensed” and required for formation of new synaptic boutons at the NMJ. This highlighted the role of biomechanics beyond chemical signaling and neuronal activity in regulating synaptic plasticity. Rita’s lab is now combining molecular investigations in the Drosophila NMJ with 3D neural organoids derived from human cultures to study how biophysical factors like contractility and stiffness are sensed and integrated by neurons to regulate synaptic plasticity. This is an exciting niche at the interface of genetics, molecular biology, neurophysiology, and biophysics, aligned with Rita’s lifelong interest in how cells sense and respond to their environment. While Drosophila remains her model of choice, Rita believes that in vitro systems like brain organoids will be key to uncovering how nervous systems develop and reorganize. She is particularly intrigued by the observation that both the closure of critical developmental periods and the onset of aging are marked by an increase in neural tissue stiffness—changes that potentially gate synaptic plasticity. Identifying the molecular pathways that control stiffness, and learning how to modulate them, could one day allow researchers to reopen windows of neural adaptability.
Rita’s childhood dream has come true, even though her embrace of her curiosity has taken her in unexpectedly exciting directions. She now finds as much satisfaction in teaching and mentoring as in scientific discovery itself. In the lab, she sees her role as helping people navigate and grow in the choppy waters of science, not as driving the boat herself. She encourages her trainees to develop the same skills that first drew her to research—designing experiments, troubleshooting, interpreting, and writing. For Rita, the most satisfying part of running a lab is not finding definitive answers but building the framework that allows new questions to emerge.
Find out more about Rita and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Rita on June 24, 2025 below!
