Raul was born in Tubarão (Brazil) and completed his bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). Following his interests in stem cell and developmental biology, Raul carried out his PhD studies at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine of the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) as part of the Science Without Borders scheme. His PhD work focused on the dissection of transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms controlling stem cell behaviour in aggressive childhood brain tumours known as high-grade gliomas. Further expanding his interests in stem cell biology, Raul later carried his postdoctoral training at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), where he studied transcriptional mechanisms regulating maturation and regeneration of the intestinal epithelium in pathological conditions known as inflammatory bowel diseases. During his PhD and postdoctoral training Raul was received several awards, including the highly prestigious EMBO and MSCA postdoctoral fellowships, and published in highly prestigious journals, such as Science, Cell Stem Cell and Nature Genetics. As a senior staff scientist in the Valiente team, Raul’s long-term goal is to develop more effective therapies for paediatric brain tumours via an enhanced understanding of normal brain development and underlying mechanisms of oncogenic competence. He aims to capitalize on his expertise on genome editing, disease modelling and functional genetics to explore how mechanisms of development are disrupted in paediatric brain tumours. Joining forces with the Valiente team, Raul is using this knowledge in genome engineering and stem cell biology to generate refined human models of paediatric brain tumours for exploration of fundamental disease biology and drug discovery purposes.