Faces of Portuguese Research: Miguel Bastos Araújo

Childhood landscapes

He was born outside Portugal in 1969 because his father had been imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship of the so-called “Estado Novo”, and in order to escape the meat grinder of colonial war in Africa, he ran across the Spanish border. He reached Belgium, was granted refugee status under the United Nations, and his mother joined him there. Miguel arrived in that context, registered as the child of a stateless person. He was five when the April Revolution allowed the family to come home.

Those early years in Belgium left a mark he still carries. He grew up divided between Lisbon and Évora, and the Alentejo became his home deeply, but there was always something pulling him back toward the central European deciduous forests of his infancy. “There is something very deep in me that connects me to those forests,” he says. Scientists would probably explain it through the concept of childhood landscapes, the environments that shape emotional memory before conscious thought takes over.

His appetite for the natural world was always present. His maternal grandfather, who had been born in Mozambique and worked as an electrician on the railways, but was also a pilot, a wildlife photographer and a gifted storyteller, filled evenings with accounts of lions and buffalo and a lion cub his daughter had grown up alongside at home. His father, a biologist, took him into the field to collect insects, which they catalogued together afterwards. He collected weekly natural history fascicles, spending hours on the distribution maps that accompanied each species. By the time he was eleven, the answer to what he wanted to do with his life was clear: he wanted to be a zoogeographer.

Aberdeen, London, and a career shaped by persistence

He studied geography at Nove University of Lisbon and spent a formative year in Aberdeen, where the university library gave him access to scientific literature that did not exist in Portugal at the time. It changed how he thought about research. He went on to do a master’s degree in conservation biology and a doctorate in geography at University College London, jointly hosted with the Natural History Museum in London, followed by years at the CNRS in France, Oxford, Copenhagen, Imperial College London, and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, one of Spain’s two major biodiversity research centres.

Getting the master’s degree had required a particular kind of stubbornness. He applied to the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) for a grant to study abroad and was told that year that grants were only available for study within Portugal. He went anyway, with family support and very little money in his pocket, and spent the duration contesting the decision in writing. “I kept arguing,” he says. By the time he was finishing the degree, they relented and awarded it to him exceptionally, allowing him to pay his debts. The same determination carried him into a three-month internship at the Natural History Museum, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the British Council, after he wrote to both institutions independently, without any open call to apply to, explaining what he wanted to do. The researcher who had initially told him he would need to pay bench fees waived them. “He said [the money from the grants] would be needed to live in London,” Miguel recalls. That internship was the turning point in his career.

The country that said no

Portugal presented itself as a possibility twice and twice came up short. The first time, a government centre that had approached him about building a biodiversity research group was dissolved by a ministerial merger before the supporting positions could be opened. Making him decide to do a post-doctoral Marie Curie fellowship at Oxford. The second time was harder to take. He applied for an associate professorship at the Faculty of Sciences in Lisbon and was eliminated on procedural grounds: his application had not listed the names of his parents, something required somewhere in the regulations but absent from the call itself. “At the time I felt it was quite personal, like my own country didn’t want me,” he says. He later understood the competition had most likely been designed to promote someone already inside the institution and that his curriculum had been the problem. “The administration doesn’t always work very well,” he says, without apparent bitterness.

The return happened through a different door. The Rui Nabeiro Biodiversity Chair at the University of Évora was the first privately funded chair in Portuguese scientific history, financed by the Delta Cafés group. An international competition was held with an international jury, and Miguel won. The years that followed were productive in a specific way he values: the funding was flexible. “When a great person appeared, we could hire them,” he says. “That freedom to manage a fund and set your own scientific policy in the lab is a luxury.” He has that kind of funding now in Spain, but not in Portugal, where project-based grants dominate, and strategic decisions are harder to make.

The science of energy and life

Miguel’s laboratory works on the principles that govern how and why life distributes itself across space and time, using climate, past, present and projected, as the main variable. One of his most significant contributions was introducing ensemble forecasting to ecology: rather than relying on a single predictive model, his approach runs multiple algorithms simultaneously and combines their outputs, producing more robust projections and making uncertainty measurable. The tools developed through collaborative work involving his lab, including the SDM-R and BIOMOD platforms, became widely used in international biodiversity assessments.

His current work goes further. “We are converting all biological information into energy,” he explains. Every organism consumes energy proportional to its size and abundance. If you know where organisms are and in what numbers, you can calculate total energy consumption across an entire community, and place lynx, insects, cattle, and data centres on the same analytical scale. From there, you can begin to ask how much consumption a system can sustain before it collapses. “Energy, at the end of the day, is the great unit of life,” he says.

The Council of State

In April 2026, the President of the Republic called him while he was travelling with his family. He put the phone on speaker and gestured for silence. When he hung up, his children asked who it had been. “They were amazed,” he says. He had been nominated to the Council of State, the first ecologist and biogeographer ever to sit on that body. He believes the choice was deliberate: the President nominated one researcher from medicine and one from the environmental sciences.

Miguel is careful about what he does not know yet. How a President uses the Council of State is a matter of personal style, and he had not yet had that conversation. What he does believe is that climate change has been pushed down the political agenda by geopolitical conflict and energy security concerns, and that someone needs to keep it in the room. “The Paris targets have already been surpassed,” he says. “There is no expectation in the scientific community that we will stop there.” His response to that is not dramatic. Researchers must keep doing the best science they can, build the knowledge, and be ready. “Those who are scientists cannot be demoralised,” he says.

In the end, we are better placed to understand where life will go as the climate shifts, and what can still be done about it, in part because a boy in Évora once spent his afternoons studying distribution maps in a natural history fascicle, and never really stopped asking the same question.