“Basic research and teaching should go hand-in-hand”

Joao Matos was born in Portugal, did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Germany), and carried out postdoctoral work in the UK. Later, he joined the ETH (Switzerland) as an Assistant Professor in 2014 and was appointed Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Max Perutz Labs / University of Vienna in 2020. We talked to him about how he fell in love with meiosis, why University education should be led by basic research scientists, and how his high school teachers stopped him from becoming a football player.