A Global Research Journey: João between labs and landscapes

To mark the 30th anniversary of MSCA, ViroiDoc invites its doctoral candidates to share their mobility experiences in a blog series in 2026.

I discovered ViroiDoc by coincidence during a bioinformatics training course on plant virus detection. By sharing ideas with a Slovenian researcher, I found the doctoral network. Previously, I was working at a laboratory in Elvas, a small town in Portugal, which focused on plant health and biological solutions for plant diseases. Wanting a new opportunity, I knew that my master’s in bioinformatics and my experience in plant disease made me a good fit for the ViroiDoc network.

For me, Slovenia and Ljubljana are best be described as calm and green. The city feels hugged by forests, and it's a joy to cycle anywhere around it in my day to day. I was lucky enough to experience some snow this last winter and got to go skiing, but the city can also be very gloomy, which is quite different from Lisbon, where I studied.

I managed to maintain some of my habits alongside balancing my studies, such as working out, hiking in Tivoli Park, and occasionally going bouldering with another doctoral candidate.

There are always the challenges: being surrounded by a new language, not living close to the sea, and not eating as much fish as I would have liked. Otherwise, my department colleagues were great at helping me settle in and were always available to assist me from the outset. My supervisors have been especially supportive in the wet lab for my PhD project, helping me gain experience despite my lack of prior knowledge of laboratory work.

Looking back, this experience has been exactly what I hoped for when joining MSCA: a mix of new environments, new skills, and people who make the journey meaningful.

João Colaço is an MSCA Fellow within the ViroiDoc Network. João is conducting an individual research project entitled “How disrupting viroid biogenesis impacts viroid propagation” at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana (UL) in Slovenia, while also pursuing his PhD in at the same institution. His supervisors are Jernej Jakše and co-supervisor Helena Volk, both from UL.

Read blog posts on the ViroiDoc website.