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. == External links ==