Mário Carvalho graduated from a Bachelor in Biomedical Sciences, minor in Molecular Biomedicine, in 2012 at the University of Aveiro (highest percentile, 17/20) and moved to Coimbra to enrol on the Masters in Cellular and Molecular Biology, minor in Neurobiology. He developed a thesis entitled "Molecular Mechanism of the synaptic and cognitive effects of ghrelin", under the supervision of Prof. João Peça and Prof. Ana Luísa Carvalho, and graduated in 2014 with 19/20 (highest percentile) winning an academic scholarship attributed to students with the highest score during that year. This work sparked his interest in neurophysiology and the implementation and optimization of scientific techniques. Between 2015 and 2020, he conducted and concluded his PhD in the MIT-Portugal Program in Bioengineering, coordinated by NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) (Portugal), and supervised by Prof. João Peça, Prof. Ana Luísa Carvalho and Prof. Manuel Nunes da Ponte. He also had the opportunity to work under the supervision of Inbal Israeli at the Champalimaud Program for Neuroscience (Lisbon, Portugal), for 2 months, where he developed Matlab scripts for analysing two-photon calcium imaging data. At CNC he became partially responsible for the implementation and optimization of several major techniques: brain slice electrophysiology, animal behavior and surgical application of cannulas for intracerebral injection. He was trained in electrophysiology by Paulo Pinheiro at the CNC and won a FENS Grant in order to attend the ELECTRAIN course on in vitro electrophysiology (2016) at the European Neuroscience Institute (Göttingen, Germany). He became proficient in these techniques and trained several, Master, PhD student and Postdocs. This work culminated in the publication of a Nature Communications paper (2019) describing the role of Gprasp2 in autism-like behaviours that won the prestigious 2019 prize from Pfizer/Society of Medical Sciences of Lisbon. For his PhD thesis, titled "Peptides that signal hunger - a new role in memory and social behaviors", he explored how the brain is changed by social subordination and early life stress, two important contributing factors for psychiatric disorders, and the role of neuropeptide Y signalling in these processes. This work resulted in a publication as co-first author in Neuropsychopharmacology (2020). He also used animal behavior tests to show, for the first time, the role of constitutive ghrelin receptor activity on memory formation, leading to a publication as co-first author in Science Signaling (2021). He presented this work at several scientific meetings and conferences. Immediately after his PhD, he started working as a contracted researcher in Paulo Pinheiros lab (at CNC), an expert in electrophysiology and synapse biology, in order to expand his skills in in vitro electrophysiology. Here, attracted by the complexity of the synapse and by its dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders, he began studying the functions of alternative SNAP protein isoforms. In summary, his yet short career in science already resulted in the publication of 3 important papers in high-impact international journals, of which he is co-first author in two. All were published in Q1 or top 10% journals, have an average Impact Factor of >9.1 and, despite very recent, accumulated to date 13 citations (h-index = 2). He presented his work in several scientific meetings/conferences. He played an indispensable part in the implementation and optimization of highly used techniques that were not previously available at the CNC and only rarely available in Portugal. His work on these techniques became a cornerstone of the publications he co-authored and provided an important contribution to the majority of scientific projects in the labs where he worked. His highly collaborative attitude also contributed to the training of several students in electrophysiology techniques.