Sergio Dias

Sérgio Dias obtained his degree in Biology at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, completed in 1994. He then took his PhD in Tumor Immunology (focusing on animal models of breast cancer) in London, at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1995-1998).

Sérgio Dias carried out his post-doctoral training at Cornell University, in New York, in the USA between 1999 and 2001 (3 Years). After this period, he returned to Portugal and established his laboratory at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology (IPO), in Lisbon. He was Assistant Researcher and Director of the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at the IPO of Lisbon for 10 years, during which he was also a Guest Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the Nova University in Lisbon (2009-2012).

Currently, Sérgio Dias is Principal Investigator at the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine and Invited Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (since 2013). He is also Co-director of the IMM Biobank since 2014 and Coordinator of the National Biobank Network (which is part of the Portuguese Science Foundation Infrastructure Network).

To date, he has supervised 12 PhD students, 17 Master students and 12 post-doctoral researchers. The research carried out in his laboratory, focused on the study of cancer as a systemic disease (namely on the mechanisms of metastasis formation), resulted in the publication of 82 articles in indexed international journals, with 16,940 citations and an h factor of 45 (September 2025).

Sérgio Dias has been teaching cancer biology to undergraduate students and the general public for over 15 years, having given lectures on this topic at several venues, such as Schools and Institutes in the Greater Lisbon area. He also writes a monthly article in Visão, a general-knowledge based magazine, popular in Portugal.