Maria de Sousa

Maria Ângela Brito de Sousa (17 October 1939 – 14 April 2020) was a Portuguese immunologist, science leader poet and writer.

Maria de Sousa was born in Lisbon in 1939.

Her father was a naval officer and her mother a homemaker.

She graduated from medical school at the University of Lisbon in 1963.

In 1964, she moved to London to work at the then Imperial Cancer Research Fund's Experimental Biology Laboratories.

She won a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship.

and from 1964 to 1966 de Sousa worked with Delphine Parrott studying mice who had their thymus removed.

She gained international recognition as a medical researcher, as the author of several seminal scientific papers: she was the first to describe thymus-dependent (or T cell) areas in 1966, a fundamental discovery in the mapping of peripheral lymphoid organs; she coined the term "ecotaxis" in 1971, to describe the phenomenon of cells of different origins to migrate and to organize among themselves in very specific lymphoid areas.

In 1966, she moved to the University of Glasgow to do a PhD. She observed in her study by light microscopy, that lymphocytes from the thymus, the so-called T-cells move to other lymphatic organs a process which she termed ecotaxis.

In 1975 went to NYC.

She was an adjunct professor at what was then Cornell Medical College and became head of the cell ecology lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

An interest in the non-immunological functions of lymphocytes, such as iron metabolism led her to study hemochromatosis, which is common in northern Portugal.

In the 1980s she focused on the study of hereditary hemochromatosis, an iron overload genetic disease.

In 1984, she returned to Portugal, as Professor of Immunology at the medical school of the Instituto Abel Salazar, University of Porto.

She established a Masters Program in Immunology and over the next 10 years she helped forge two Ph.D. programs, one of them being the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and in 1996, the Graduate Program in Basic and Applied Biology (GABBA).

In October 2009, she retired from the University of Porto.

Sousa "was fond of art", she was a pianist and poet.

She died in Lisbon on 14 April 2020, leaving no immediate survivors.

She was a victim of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal, after a week in the intensive care unit of São José Hospital.

Among the many top figures in Portuguese science and society that paid homage to Sousa, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, issued a statement offering his condolences to the family, referring to her as a "unmatched figure in Portuguese science" and underscoring her "inescapable legacy in science and great example in rigor, exigence, and civic and cultural commitment".