Welcome Mauricio Gonçalves da Costa Sousa, our new Assistant Professor in Basic Oral Sciences

What is your role? What will you be working on?

I am an Assistant Professor in Basic Oral Sciences, recruited through Karolinska Institutet’s 2025 international call for assistant professors. My work focuses on building complex laboratory models of oral tissues: small living systems that let us study oral diseases, and especially oral cancers, in ways that are difficult to do in patients or animals.

What are your future research plans in your role here, and what do you see as the focus areas of your research in the coming years? 

My goal is to build "mini-tissues on a chip" that act as disease avatars: small, living models of the mouth that we can study in fine detail. There is a real and growing push to reduce the use of animals in research, and that motivates me. I want to reach a point where we can assemble living tissue from its building blocks, combining cells, microbes, and the surrounding matrix almost like plug-and-play components. Working this way lets us take apart the complexity of the tumor microenvironment one variable at a time and ask how the microbes living in our mouths help cancers evade the immune system.

What are you most looking forward to about working here?

I am very inspired by the environment at KI and in Flemingsberg. The Department of Dental Medicine is one of the best in the world, and it has long worked to connect oral health with the health of the whole body. For a long time, those were treated as separate fields. At KI, that integration is real, and it lets us position oral research at a completely different level.

Where are you from and what have you done previously?

I grew up in a small village in the Brazilian countryside, and I was fascinated by microbes from early on. That interest took me to dental school in Brazil's capital, Brasília, where I became captivated by host defense peptides: natural molecules that can kill microbes in the mouth and guide the immune system to heal injured tissue. I did my PhD partly in Brazil and partly in Canada, then returned to Brazil to defend my thesis. From there I moved to Portland, in the United States, for a postdoc at Oregon Health & Science University, where I learned to build complex laboratory models and to engineer tissues. During that time, I developed a "bone-on-a-chip", a model that recreates the calcified, multicellular structure of real bone and can mature bone cells without the growth factors normally required.

What is your previous research experience, and in which field have you been active? 

My background is in oral biology, with a focus on oral microbiology, immunology, and tissue engineering. Across all of it, the common thread has been using bioengineering to understand and treat diseases of the mouth.

What do you do when you’re not working?

I love the arts: wandering through museums, taking long walks, and getting lost in libraries. I'm also a big music person. I play guitar and sing; I am always up for karaoke, and I love to dance.