Paulo A. Ferreira is a native from Portugal. He came to the USA in 1986. He received his undergraduate degrees in Biology from University of Porto (Portugal) and Jacksonville State University in 1988 with distinction and honors. He obtained his doctoral degree in Neurosciences in 1993 under the mentorship of Dr. William L. Pak at Purdue University. His doctoral work was focused on the identification and dissection of homologous biological processes of Drosophila that are critical to the function and survival of neurons in mammals. His postdoctoral training was performed at U.T Southwestern Medical Center with Dr. Gabriel Travis and it comprised an extension of discoveries made during his doctoral research on the investigation of genes/factors affecting the biogenesis of a class of G protein-coupled receptors. In 1997, he became an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he raised to the rank of Associate Professor in 2001. He joined Duke University Medical Center in 2005, where he an Associate Professor with tenure in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. He is the recipient of several awards throughout his research and academic career and he currently holds a Jules and Doris Stein Professorship. His research is focused broadly on understanding how signaling and trafficking pathways are integrated and relay intracellular and extracellular cues across subcellular compartments in genetic mouse and cellular models. Another goal of his laboratory is to probe the role such pathway networks play in the expression of aging and disease processes, such as Parkinson, and that lead to the degeneration of selective neurons of the CNS (e.g. dopaminergic neurons), and other human maladies.