José Teles Reis received his BSc in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal in 2018. He developed his Master’s thesis at the NOVA Medical School, also in Lisbon, supervised by Catarina Homem, where he characterized the developmental trajectory of neural stem cells to neurons at the single cell level in Drosophila.

For his PhD, José joined the lab of Tor Erik, at the University of Oslo, in Norway, to study how host tissue genetics and interactions with the microenvironment influence tumor development keeping Drosophila as a model. He investigated how genetic alterations of clinically relevant oncogenes and tumor suppressors in neighboring epithelial cells influence Ras-driven tumor growth, and found that interclonal interactions and inflammatory signalling promote non-autonomous Ras clone growth. Additionally, he developed EyaHOST, a genetic toolkit that enables independent manipulation of tumor cells and host tissues.

In June 2026, José joined the Cancer Dormancy & Immunity Laboratory at the Champalimaud Foundation as a postdoctoral researcher, where he welcomes new model systems to investigate how metabolism shapes tumor-immune interactions during the formation of liver metastases.