Alexandre Quintanilha Explained

Alexandre Quintanilha
Honorific-Suffix:GOSE
Office:Member of the Portuguese Parliament
Term Start:23 October 2015
Term End:25 March 2024
Birth Name:Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha
Birth Date:1945 8, df=y
Birth Place:Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Portuguese Mozambique
Party:Socialist Party
Alma Mater:University of the Witwatersrand
University of Paris
Website:Parliament Website - Parlamento.pt
Citizenship:Portugal
Constituency:Porto

Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha, GOSE (born 9 August 1945) 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. (Hons) in theoretical physics in 1967 (University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg), and his Ph.D. in solid state physics 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 writer and journalist Richard Zimler. They met in December of 1978 and began living together that same month. 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.

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