Short CV
Ruben Portugues was born in Madrid, Spain. He studied Mathematics at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, where he also obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 2004, studying soliton solution in M-theory. After a short postdoc in theoretical physics at Centro de Estudios Cientificos in Valdivia, Chile, in 2006 he moved to the laboratory of Florian Engert at Harvard University to pursue a postdoc in neurobiology. There he investigated sensorimotor integration in the larval zebrafish, pioneering approaches to perform whole-brain imaging in behaving animals with single-cell resolution, in order to correlate behavior and brain activity. In 2014, he moved to the Max Planck of Neurobiology in Martinsried to lead the Research Group of Sensorimotor Control and, in January 2020, he became a Professor at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Technical University of Munich.
Selected Awards
Research Interests
Ruben Portugues is interested in how the brain encodes representations of the external world and how these representations are used to select motor actions and modify behavior. His group uses functional calcium imaging and electrophysiology to monitor the activity of neurons in the brain as animals perform a variety of tasks. These experiments are able to record the activity of almost all 100.000 neurons in the brain of these small vertebrates. In addition, he utilizes modeling and computational approaches to understand this data and generate biological hypothesis that can be tested using ablations and optogenetic manipulations.
Selected Publications
- A neural representation of naturalistic motion-guided behavior in the zebrafish brain
T Yildizoglu, C Riegler, JE Fitzgerald, R Portugues
Current Biology 30 (12), 2321-2333 – [2020]
- Evidence accumulation during a sensorimotor decision task revealed by whole-brain imaging
EI Dragomir, V Štih, R Portugues
Nature Neuroscience 23 (1), 85-93 – [2020]
- Motor context dominates output from Purkinje cell functional regions during reflexive visuomotor behaviors
LD Knogler, AM Kist, R Portugues
eLife 8, e42138 – [2019]
- A novel mechanism for mechanosensory-based rheotaxis in larval zebrafish.
P Oteiza, I Odstrcil, G Lauder, R Portugues, F Engert
Nature 547 (7664), 445 – [2017]
- Sensorimotor representations in cerebellar granule cells in larval zebrafish are dense, spatially organized, and non-temporally patterned
LD Knogler, DA Markov, EI Dragomir, V Štih, R Portugues
Current Biology 27 (9), 1288-1302 – [2017]
- Neural control and modulation of swimming speed in the larval zebrafish
KE Severi, R Portugues, JC Marques, DM O’Malley, MB Orger, F Engert
Neuron 83 (3), 692-707 – [2014]
- Whole-brain activity maps reveal stereotyped, distributed networks for visuomotor behavior
R Portugues, CE Feierstein, F Engert, MB Orger
Neuron 81 (6), 1328-1343 – [2014]
- Brain-wide neuronal dynamics during motor adaptation in zebrafish
MB Ahrens, JM Li, MB Orger, DN Robson, AF Schier, F Engert, R Portugues
Nature 485 (7399), 471-477 – [2012]
- Adaptive locomotor behavior in larval zebrafish
R Portugues, F Engert
Frontiers in systems neuroscience 5 – [2011]
All publications can be found on the lab website: https://portugueslab.com/publications or on Google scholar.
Publications as TUM-IAS-Fellow
