Wilson Abreu is an integrated researcher at CINTESIS, in the Nursing School of Porto (ESEP), where he works as a Principal Coordinating Professor Principal. His path crosses different continents and areas of knowledge, moving between Africa and Russia, between Health and the “Interpretive Sciences”, between the roses in his garden and the classics of world literature, between HIV and dementias.

He was born in Angola in 1959, to Madeiran settlers who went to live in Lubango, in the south, about two centuries ago. He remembers that time as being “a fantastic period” in his life. He is the son of an employee working in public contracts, he moved to the north of that country, near former Zaire, an area known for armed conflicts. Like all wars, this one generated fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. His interest in mental health comes from that time.

“From a very early age, I got used to living in a war situation and dealing with human suffering and trauma. For years, I shared the same play space with military personnel. I was an absolutely normal child and asked many questions about what I saw. This marked my childhood very much,” he says.

Later on, but still before decolonization, “I also had to live through the terrible fratricidal war at the time of independence. At that time, the cultural issues were very striking because it was largely a war between ethnic groups. I got to know many of them – the habits, the beliefs, the preferences, the representations, the rituals. I realized that culture is fundamental to human nature and that it marks relationships, behaviors, and decision-making. And that each cultural group, based on their beliefs, built their own systems of care.

In 1975, he changed cities, countries, and continents. Caught up in the decolonization process, he settled in Porto, in his teens and at the end of high school. Therefore, a bad time for a change. But it wasn’t all bad: the welcome was warm, in contrast to the autumn chill that was being felt at the time.

“The integration process is always difficult, but I can consider myself happy because I was very welcomed when I arrived. What hurt me the most was not the relationship with the colleagues or the sociopolitical environment, but the climate difference. I remember that at that time I had the pleasure to start studying the Portuguese classics. These classics were important to consolidating my cultural identity,” he says. “I was fortunate to have fantastic teachers who even in high school would tell us about the classics of literature, even from other countries. In contact with the classics of French, English, Brazilian, and Russian literature I learned that they are absolutely essential to understand human nature.”

Over the years, he progressively approached the area of Health Sciences. He graduated in Nursing and specialized in Mental Health and Psychiatry in 1987. He began teaching in 1989. He completed his Masters and Ph.D. in Education Sciences at the University of Lisbon in 1994 and 1999, respectively.

He did his first post-doctorate in Paris in Anthropology (on social representations linked to health and illness). Essentially, “it was possible to understand how culture interferes with health, illness, and systems of seeking and providing care. He studied systems of care and female genital mutilation in greater depth.

Eight years later, with the “terminus” of a European project focused on dementia, he developed a set of studies focused on advanced dementia and palliative care and collaborated in the development of European protocols of good practice in the care of these people, emphasizing the importance of nursing professionals in the follow-up of users and their family caregivers.

This was, in fact, the object of his second postdoctoral fellowship, in 2018, at the University of Aveiro and the University of the West of Scotland, in Glasgow, Scotland, as part of a project funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The collaboration with the University of Aveiro, in terms of postgraduate education and research, allowed him to carry out an innovative work at a national level, later disseminated throughout the country: clinical supervision in nursing.

He became a researcher at CINTESIS when ESEP joined the research center based at the University of Porto. In his opinion, joining CINTESIS “made the difference in ESEP’s research. We started to have partners from other disciplines with whom we could do research in health. This was already the trend of research in the European Union. Research in the specific framework of Nursing was not neglected, but the possibility of developing research with other partners in the area of Health – mental health, geriatrics, artificial intelligence, and information systems – was opened.

Wilson Abreu has in his remarkable curriculum vast experience as a researcher and professor at an international level, although he has also been active in the areas of Management. In 2020, he completed 28 years of teaching. In 2018, he was awarded the title of Professor Honoris Causa. He celebrated 20 years of teaching in the Russian Federation, Lithuania, and Brazil. In Brazil, he is part of groups studying infectious diseases, namely HIV/AIDS and now COVID-19, using mathematical models and artificial intelligence. “If it weren’t for the pandemic, 2020 would have been a golden year in terms of projects and international partnerships,” he says.

Precisely in 2020 and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the research groups in which he participates with other Portuguese and Spanish researchers, received funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology to develop a project that considered the need to study the balance between confinement and preservation of the economy’s essentials, important for the functioning of society. The study relied on mathematical models (“optimal control models”) to understand the spread of the virus and confinement policies. The most relevant results of the study were published this year with the title: “Optimal control of the COVID‑19 pandemic: controlled sanitary deconfinement in Portugal”.

“We know that confinement prevents the spread of the virus, but we also know that if we keep countries closed, we weaken the economy. We have to find a balance point. This paper of ours shows that we cannot be in very long confinement periods, but we also cannot do without them to stop, to stem the spread of the virus. Our paper helps to understand that we need to have strict confinement periods, followed by open periods, which must be decided at the regional level and according to certain criteria. The policymakers are now doing something that we had concluded would be the best way forward for our society,” he says.

This project builds on previous work developed with the Imperial College (London) and the Federal and State Universities of Ceará, in Brazil, where he explored with multidisciplinary teams Artificial Intelligence for understanding and preventing the spread of HIV.

He has authored several books and scientific articles in specialized journals and has given about two hundred lectures around the world. Wilson Abreu has great hope in RISE – Health Research Network. He believes that the multidisciplinary reality of CINTESIS will be clearly amplified with the laboratory that was recently approved by the FCT, “an achievement we should all be proud of”.

“I believe that this Laboratory will be the amplification of the multidisciplinary spirit that already exists in CINTESIS. We have everything to have an extraordinary research center, with potential for developing projects at a national and international level and, above all, with an enormous capacity to transfer research evidence to society, through the health institutions involved in the network,” he concludes.

1-year ambition

In terms of research, we have already funded projects with Brazil in the area of COVID-19. The study is based on several questions. We want to know what was the impact of the infection and the confinement on the psychological state of people, including health professionals, who had to deal with patients in a very critical situation. Another aspect that we are going to try to study is the medium- and long-term health consequences of the infection. We are talking essentially about neurocognitive, pulmonary, and neurological sequelae. I must say that the most encouraging thing is that we are not starting from scratch. Thousands of research units study these areas and share (as never happened before) their results and evidence. I believe that COVID-19 will still mark my research for the next two or three years. I believe that research with Brazil in the area of HIV/AIDS will remain on my agenda, as several Ph.D. students are working in this area.

10-year ambition

I am predicting that we will get COVID-19 under control in a few years, basically with the massification of vaccines. But what we have learned will make the next few years “golden years” in many areas. We have concluded that prevention is absolutely essential for people and societies. We will certainly invest in several areas of health literacy. Dementia will tend to worsen, not only due to the aging of the population but also due to the successive confinements. We have some solutions at the clinical level, not to make the most severe dementias regress, but to promote comfort and preserve as much as possible the capacity for self-care. At the same time, the solution is also to invest in more and better social support, along with specialized interventions that mental health professionals know well. Societies have to do much more to support their elderly and among them those with dementia. Support at the political and local level for family caregivers has to be intensified. In these areas, Nursing has a key role to play – either by designing intelligibility frameworks to produce and amplify knowledge, or by investing more in the operationalization of self-care, management of therapeutic regimes, and support to family caregivers. These are all dimensions that we will know how to equate, work, and deepen.

Life Beyond Research

“So much, certainly so much life. I love cars, exploring automotive technology, but I am also proud of my garden, with several fruit trees and especially several dozen species of rose bushes. It is a very personal investment. I think it has a therapeutic effect… it helps me to have a more positive attitude towards life, essentially when, like everyone else, I have more difficult moments. I think, or am even sure, that my rose bushes have helped me a lot during confinement. I take care of them almost daily. I know them one by one. A rose is nature’s work of art – the height of perfection. I also like my trees. I enjoy watching them grow, bloom, and bear fruit. All this takes time, but it is a good investment in mental health and in this need to maintain, despite everything, a positive attitude towards life”.

I really miss being with my colleagues from other societies and countries. Zoom doesn’t solve everything. That’s what we learn on a daily basis, with our students. A close relationship is very important for human beings. I hope that we can soon recover what this pandemic has robbed us of.