Ardem Patapoutian won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2021 (along with David Julius). He is a recipient of a scholarship in 1985 from the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to enable him to attend first year of university in Lebanon (American University of Beirut). In 1986, the family migrated to the United States where he continued his education at UCLA, and eventually earned a PhD from the California Institute of Technology.

His research, for which he won the Nobel Prize is on the biological receptors that sense temperature and touch. He is currently a neuroscience professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in California, and an investigator at Scripps Research. Both are leading bioscience research institutes.

In this conversation with journalist Sara Sá, as part of a visit to Lisbon organised in partnership with the Champalimaud Foundation, we will learn a little more about his life and his personal and academic career.