Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha,
GOSE (born August 9, 1945 in
Lourenço Marques (now
Maputo),
Mozambique) is a Portuguese scientist, former director of the
Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular (Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology) of the
University of Porto and Professor at
ICBAS - Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
Biography
Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha,
GOSE was born in Lourenço Marques (now
Maputo)
Portuguese East Africa on August 9, 1945, at the time a
Portuguese colony. His father,
Aurélio Quintanilha, was Portuguese, from the
Azores islands, and one of the first scientists to study
fungi. Aurélio Quintanilha worked in Coimbra, Berlin and Paris. Alexandre Quintanilha's mother was German, from Berlin. The family moved to Mozambique in the 1940s, where Alexandre was born.
Studies
Quintanilha completed his secondary school studies in Lourenço Marques, then went to South Africa to study at university level. He completed his
B.Sc.
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...
(Hons) in
theoretical physics in 1967 (
University of the Witwatersrand, in
Johannesburg), and his
Ph.D. in
solid state physics
Solid-state physics is the study of rigid matter, or solids, through methods such as quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state physics studies how the l ...
in 1972 (
University of Paris).
Work
Quintanilha switched his focus to biology on moving to California in 1972. He worked for nearly 18 years at the
University of California, Berkeley, in the US, before returning to Portugal in 1990 and becoming director of the
Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular (Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology) of the
University of Porto.
Personal life
Alexandre is married to his longtime partner,
North-American
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Ca ...
writer and journalist
Richard Zimler. They married as soon as
same-sex marriage was legalized in
Portugal, in 2010. Since 1990 the two men have been living in
Porto,
Portugal.
External links
European Science Foundation appoints Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha as new chairman of the Standing Committee for Life and Environmental SciencesAlexandre Quintanilha on National Geographic Portugal
(Portuguese)
Portuguese people of German descent
Portuguese scientists
Living people
Portuguese LGBT scientists
Portuguese gay men
University of the Witwatersrand alumni
1945 births
Gay scientists
Gay academics
21st-century Portuguese LGBT people
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