Prof. Duarte Barral completed the Degree in Microbiology and Genetics in 1997 from the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences and the PhD in Cell Biology in 2003 from Imperial College London. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School until he took a position as Principal Investigator of the Membrane Traffic in Disease at the Chronic Diseases Research Center (CEDOC) from NOVA Medical School, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in 2009. 

He is currently an Associate Professor at the same School. Duarte Barral has been working in the field of membrane traffic and its regulation by GTPases of the Rab and Arf families for 20 years. 

He has helped uncover the previously unknown role of several of these proteins, namely Rab27a (Stinchcombe et al., J Cell Biol., 2001; Hume et al., Traffic, 2002), Arl8b (Garg et al, Immunity, 2011), Arl13b (Barral et al, PNAS, 2012; Casalou et al., J. Cell Sci., 2014; Casalou et al., Cancers, 2019) and Rab35 (Kuhns et al., EMBO Rep., 2019), and established that Rab isoforms can be functionally redundant by studying Rab27a and Rab27b in the pigmentary disorder Griscelli syndrome (Barral et al., J Clin. Invest., 2002).