Obituary: Roberto Frussa-Filho (1960–2013)

Abstract

Dr. Roberto Frussa-Filho, a great neuroscientist and even greater person, died on 20 September 2013. The untimely passing of Roberto at 53 years of age was a substantial loss to family, friends, colleagues, and students, as well as the entire field of psychopharmacology. Roberto was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on 30 June 1960, and received both his bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences and his masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Sao Paulo under the guidance of Dr. Joao Palermo-Neto, his first and everlasting mentor. Even before achieving his doctoral degree, Roberto joined the Pharmacology Division of Marilia Medical School in 1986 as a professor, where his efforts and love for science culminated in the first five international publications in the history of that university. Later, impelled by the distance from family and friends and by the aspiration for better research conditions, Roberto continued to distinguish himself when, in 1989, he was chosen to join the Pharmacology Division of the Federal University of Sao Paulo, where he exerted his academic functions with pleasure and led one of the major research groups of the university until his last day. When referred to as the newest professor of the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Roberto commented: “This ensures my opportunity to make science for the rest of my life. For the rest of my life (or at least until mymandatory retirement), I will be able to dedicate myself to the most ludic of the activities, the delightful, serious game of questioning Nature and receiving its answers—a game to be shared with enthusiastic young people and dear colleagues.” And so it was. For years, Roberto led a strong department focused on pharmacology research and graduate trainingwhilemaintaining a highly productive individual research program. In his joyful exercise of science, consonant with his long-standing commitment to the training and welfare of promising young neuroscientists, Roberto was responsible for training 53 masters and 24 doctors and authored more than 140 publications in several major journals in the field of psychopharmacology. Even during his 2 years of fighting against cancer, Roberto kept working and mentoring, so much so that 2013 became the most productive year of his entire life. He was a prolific researcher with broad vision and remarkable creative ability, which is attested to by his creation of a new, simple, ethically feasible, internationally accepted animal model that simultaneously evaluates learning, memory, anxiety, and motor function: the plus-maze discriminative avoidance task. This new animal model to study memory–anxiety interactions was the subject of an extensive line of research throughout Roberto’s scientific career, which was always supported by psychopharmacology through the publication of several articles (Kameda et al. 2007; Patti et al. 2006; Silva et al. 1997, 2002; Zanin et al. 2013). In addition to his contributions to the field of memory, Roberto’s major contribution to the scientific field was related to the pharmacology of dopaminergic neurotransmission and L. F. Berro (*) Departamento de Psicobiologia, UNIFESP, Rua Napoleao de Barros, 925, 04024-002 Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil e-mail: berro.lf@gmail.com