Marco Antonio Zago


Marco Antonio Zago is a Brazilian physician and prominent medical scientist, who is active in the fields of hereditary diseases of the blood, molecular basis of cancer and human population genetics. Since 2007 he is also the president of the Brazilian National Research Council.
Dr. Zago graduated in Medicine from the School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto of the University of São Paulo in 1970, where he received the M.Sc. degree in medicine and the Ph.D. degree, under the supervision of Professor Cássio Bottura, one of the most outstanding Brazilian hematologist and cytogeneticist.
After his post-doctoral training at the Oxford University, in the laboratories of Professor Sir David J. Wetherall, whose group was at the time establishing the molecular bases of the thalassemias, he returned to Brazil and started a research group with a major scientific interest in the genetic bases of hematological diseases.
This group soon attracted attention with the following achievements, among others:
As a medical academic, Dr. Zago has supervised ca. 20 PhD or MSc theses, and most of his former graduate students are now researchers in different universities. Apart from his research group in Ribeirão Preto, his students have founded two other prominent research nuclei of human population genetics and hematology. He participates in two consortia coordinated by FAPESP, a science foundation in the State of S. Paulo, and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research : the sequencing of the Xylella fastidiosa genome, the first phytopathogen whose genome was completely sequenced, and the FAPESP/LICR Human Cancer Genome Project, that studied the gene expression in human neoplastic tissues, and generated one of the largest contributions of gene expression to public databases.
Dr. Zago is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and holds a Commend of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit presented by the Presidency of the Republic on August 2000.