Rui the Drunk

“A ditadura à imagem do Duce que apesar de muito viajado é um parolo que não se cansa de dizer que a melhor cidade do mundo é o Porto e que gosta de tripas e vinho verde. A sua queda pelo último já está além do prazer. Há muito que se sabe que o Rui é um temido alcoolico.“

Comment on For Better Science

In May 2026, the sleuth Carabus Maleki and myself published a story about Portugal’s most cited scientist – Rui Reis, President of i3Bs Research Institute for Biomaterials, Biodegradables and Biomimetics, full professor of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and stem cells at the University of Minho, and author of over 90 very problematic papers on PubPeer.

Back then we suspected that Reis may be a bully, since his name was on virtually every paper coming out of his i3B. But we had no clue that this dude is also apparently, well, how to put it diplomatically, a drunkard. As one commenter on For Better Science wrote:

“Rui L. Reis is an alcoholic. Most days, after lunch, it is completely impossible to talk to him“

Another commenter confirms:

“if you’re waiting for an answer from El Reis, it’s better to be in the morning! Cause after lunch, or he’s completely drunk or “out of the office”.”

Rui Reis, you don’t have to put on the red light:

“Prof Reis […] put a traffic light at his office door that was always red so that no one could reach him, probably because he was sleeping after some good wine at lunch time. About this, almost all students saw him drunk at conferences or asking for alcohol quota at the plane when traveling.“

Here another commenter, quoted above in original Portuguese, here in translation:

“What I really want to talk about is the perpetuation of mistreatment over the years. The pressure, the coercion, disrespect, the fear, the obedience. A mixture of religious sect and anti-Lisbon football fan club. A Duce-like dictatoship, someone widely travelled, yet provincial in attitude, repeatedly insisting that Porto is the best city in the world, loving tripas and green wine. His love for the latter goes beyond pleasure. It is long known that Rui is a feared alcoholic. The alcohol-fuelled episodes are epic, to the point that no one can speak to him after lunch. Who does not remember such famous scenes in South Korea, where he was found on the floor of a bathroom, of the photos in Porto at a TERMIS where he did not control his urine, having had his driving license suspended?”

“TERMIS” clearly refers to the TERMIS-EU conference by the Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society, specifically to an earlier event in Porto which took place in 2008.

I wrote to Reis about these comments, trice, to two of his email accounts (an institutional and a private one), he never replied to deny or correct them. But then again, I wrote to him in the evening, he might have been by then in no fit state to read my emails…

It’s not just drinking.

In March 2023, the local newspaper Correio da Manhã reported that the police searched Reis’s offices at i3BS, he was accused of having “travelled the world on luxury trips paid for by the University of Minho“, on his dozens of trips in the previous three years he was accompanied by his “family and friends, without considering the costs”.

Don’t think poor Rui does this to survive because his salary is too low. As two readers pointed out, as President of the EU-funded and i3BS-based Association for the Advancement of Tissue Engineering and Cell Based Technologies & Therapies (A4TEC), Reis is paid €3,300 per month, in addition to his salary as full professor at University of Minho.

It is not just drinking and financial embezzlement.

The main problem is bullying, workplace harassment and unpaid labour at i3BS, as several readers stated. And of course the fake science as the result. Here one comment:

“here was a time when the institute hosted more than 100 doctoral students. Today, that number has collapsed to a fraction of what it once was. The reason is no mystery: it is the model of governance imposed by Rui L. Reis, sheltered by the convenience of the University of Minho, which for years has chosen to look the other way. […]

More than 50 PhD students have been unable to complete their theses — not because of academic shortcomings, but simply because they refused to submit to the personal, dictatorial rules of a single individual, rules that have nothing to do with academic values.

Numerous formal complaints have been submitted to the University of Minho, to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and to other competent bodies. To this day, no action has been taken.“

Here another comment:

“A large proportion of the PhD students and postdocs who passed through there ended up leaving academia. Those who remained, serenely conceal that dark period of their lives. […]
It is worth asking how many years he has not taught a single class. Those who gave lectures on his behalf did so for free and did not even have the right to include it on their CV or prove it in any interview.“

We don’t know why Reis forced junior researchers to give his lectures for free, maybe he was drunk, maybe he was on university-paid holidays, maybe he is just scientifically illiterate, or maybe rather all three?

It is quite possible Professor Reis never did any experiments himself or read his own papers:

“”He never knew what a laboratory or a lab coat is, except to show to journalists and the politicians who visit him. He has not reviewed a paper on which he is an author for more than 15 years, for sure.“”

There are social media photos by i3BS where Reis, dressed in a lab coat and rubber gloves, proudly shows tweezers to schoolkids. Reis himself wasn’t a great student, a commenter says:

“If you search for his PhD you will find out that he did absolutely nothing special and the reason why he left the U. Porto to the U.Minho was because he faced “problems”, “incompatibilities” and had the help in that smart move from Prof. António Cunha, from the Polymer Engineer Department (who was later the Rector for two terms from 2009 to 2017 from the UMinho).“

Reis is said to have no clue about biology, being a materials engineer by training. That’s how he runs i3BS:

“Informal co-supervision has been implemented mandating senior members to co-supervise students. In most cases, Rui L Reis remains as top supervisor, The objective is to have as many students as possible, while remaining virtually free of any practical contribution. His involvement in supervision is usually zero, while the burden is transferred to others. The only contribution limits to the PhD examination. But his questions or remarks are intellectually poor. Based on his peculiar entrepreneurial experience, he is known for asking candidates about what they would do if they were given a pile of money…“

When an all-powerful yet scientifically ignorant boss bullies his precarious students and denies graduation to those who contradict him (as Reis is reported to do), only fraud can come out. This a typical i3BS paper on PubPeer, many are much worse:

Daniel P. Reis , Beatriz Domingues , Cátia Fidalgo , Rui L. Reis , Luca Gasperini , Alexandra P. Marques Bioinks Enriched with ECM Components Obtained by Supercritical Extraction Biomolecules (2022) doi: 10.3390/biom12030394

A commenter said: “He holds the student hostage, squeezing every last drop out of them at any cost.” Another spells it out:

“we are talking about a dictator that systematically harassed students and other young researchers, created inhumane work conditions, forced them into scientific misconduct, systematically committed financial fraud with research money, and threatened and intimidated anyone that did not play by his rules.
I did not work at his department, but every time I encouraged his students to speak up, they were terrified of him. He is very powerful, influential, and vindictive.”

A vindictive bullying alcoholic? What a boss to have. Oh, and this allegedly happened:

“He installed cameras everywhere at the labs and has the biometric control. Students do not have a work contract but are obligated to record their working hours, even the time they take to have lunch. Also, students need to use software from the black market because he will not pay for software licences. The student also needs to pay all costs of traveling including VISAs and ESTA. Some students had to spend money driving guests and making administrative work for visiting students [….]
One student faced the death of her father during her PhD and Prof. Reis obligated her to keep working, saying that Cristiano Ronaldo was playing when his father died.”

Thing is, Reis looks like a harmless youthful nerd on all his official photos.

The University of Minho knew everything for years, many students complained but were ignored, as a reader wrote: “Many students screamed for help at UMinho. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia knows, everyone knows.” Yet Reis was free to do as he pleases. After all, all complaints went to the Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation at University of Minho, and guess who that was between 2013 and 2019. Yeah, Rui the Drunk.

Over the years, the university made sure his victims were silenced, while Reis was showered with one award after another, next to various society prizes, academy memberships and honorary doctorates, Reis was given the $100k UNESCO International Prize for Research in Life Sciences (in 2017) or the €400k Harvey Engineering Research Award (in 2018). This way universities like to signal to whistleblowers: Better not try, we are on his side!

Bullying always leads to research fraud. And the main path to fraud was the “5+1” rule Reis imposed on his students, as several commenters explained:

“5+1 article policy for letting you finish the PhD. All articles need to be submitted before accepting the thesis submission. All articles on high impact journals should be a combine of >20 points of IF, 1 review that doesn’t count towards that count.
Non-stop overwhelming pressure, psychological abuse by him and his top lieutenants[…]. 95% or all phd students don’t finish in 4 years, most are obligated to stay for AT LEAST 1 extra year without any pay!! People’s families have to pour in their savings to help pay rent, food and transportation“

This past correction for a paper never previously flagged on PubPeer suggests that internal whistleblowers tried to report the fraud before:

Duarte Nuno Carvalho , Rita López-Cebral , Rita O. Sousa , Ana L. Alves , Lara L. Reys , Simone S. Silva , Joaquim Miguel Oliveira , Rui L Reis , Tiago H. Silva Marine collagen-chitosan-fucoidan cryogels as cell-laden biocomposites envisaging tissue engineering Biomedical materials (2020) doi: 10.1088/1748-605x/ab9f04 

Here another reader comment, about that same 5+1 Rule:

“As a former PhD student from the 3B’s, I know very well what many of my colleagues went through, and are still going through, at the hands of this place. The first time we set foot there, we are promised a world of opportunities and conditions that simply do not exist. Then, the conversation about finishing the PhD changes to: “Don’t forget you need to have 3 published papers, one in a journal with an impact factor above 15 and two more submitted, plus a review article; OR 5 papers, with 3 published and the other 2 submitted, plus the review, before you are allowed to submit any doctoral thesis!””

The rule is also confirmed by posts on Instagram, under @jesuismemesum.

I mentioned above the culture of unpaid work, which given the overall situation of the students, can be considered a form of modern slavery. Here a quote from Reis himself:

“At the beginning of your career, would you prefer to play for free for Real Madrid, or get paid to play for a third-division team?”“

Rui Reis, to a student

That’s how it works:

“As a master student there, we were not paid or had any grant/scholarship and we were obliged to be there at least 10+ hours a day, even when we didn’t have any lab/practical experiments ongoing. Plus our masters was supposed to be 1 year, thanks to 3Bs and their stupid “you need to publish in a high impact factor journal” mine was 2.5 years (p.s.in the end neither my research was that groundbreaking, or the scientific journal was that special). Not only we were completely physically tired, but we were mentally exhausted and questioning our worth because it was not normal even a very bad student to take that long to present their thesis. This situation was even worse for PhD students, that once their scholarships ended, they were forced to work full-time (and overtime of course) without any kind of payment for more than one year, relying on their savings and help of their families.“

Reis’s secretary is mentioned in readers’ comments, who allegedly threatened and humiliated the lab members on his behalf, also the “The F Word” was deployed in emails. The outcome was predictable: broken people and fake science. Here a former MSc student who 15 years ago “was paying tuition just to work for free” in 3BS:

“I had a meeting at the 3B’s Research Group with Prof. João Mano, who told me it was crucial for me to conduct further research in the 3B’s lab. The goal? To publish the results so they could get their names on the paper. I was left with basically no choice if I wanted to defend my thesis; getting publishable material for them was mandatory.

Feeling trapped, I started commuting 150 km a day to the lab, trying to get results on a new assignment related to my work in Italy, so they could merge everything into a single article. […]

I saw other students in the exact same position, completing their theses by repeating tests over and over just to get one “nice” result or image for publication, pretending it was consistent data. I felt forced to do the same, meticulously selecting data to make everything look cohesive. I just wanted to get out of there and never look back. […]

I finally had enough data for them to try to publish something. We were all fully aware that the data was fabricated to, let’s say, ‘look good.’ After several months there, I realized this was their standard modus operandi.“

João Mano is Reis’s former associate, since 2016 Full Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Aveiro, with lots of fake stuff on PubPeer. A reader mentioned a problem in Mano’s lab, of “making inappropriate comments about the number of women getting pregnant in the group” and monitoring “the locations of group members during work hours“. Yes, another bully, how unsurprising.

Here another comment, again about Mano:

“I know at least one PhD Student who despite their immense work is still stuck in the group for almost 2 years, because Mano won’t let them defend. I know many more colleagues that are many months beyond 4 years, several of them were forced to find a job to support themselves while trying to submit enough work for Mano to let them defend.

And it is not only in direct academic work that the students are exploited, but also to save work to these alleged kings. The PhD students, and sometimes even master students are coerced into doing extra work, like give classes, orient younger students and review articles, all stuff that Professors and Doctors like Mano or Vítor are supposed to do, not PhD students.

This is how Mano is currently the supervisor of some 80 PhD students and however many Master students, by passing along work and hopping across the world in first class flights. from conference to award.“

On official photos, Mano looks like a big tough no-nonsense guy, but he also chickened out and never replied to me.

The company Stemmatters (located inside i3B building) became embarrassed by their founder and president, especially after my reporting. Their Business Development Analyst Ariana C. Silva sternly warned me that “Stemmatters has no current relationship with Rui Reis” and that our claims to otherwise must be “amended or retracted.” What is closer to truth, is that although Stemmatters removed Rui the Drunk from its board in 2018, it still allows him to publicly pretend that he still runs this business, as “President/Chairman and Chief Scientific officer of Stemmatters”:

Reis also remains the founding President of the Portugese biotech Hydrumedical (Bioceramed), yet the company’s current team photo doesn’t show him.

The reason may be not just alcoholism but also Reis’s utter ineptness in run anything. A reader commented:

“We should not forget that the Discoveries project, a Teaming worth several million euros, was lost after he insisted on becoming CEO of the consortium, even though the rules did not allow it. Blinded by its huge ego, like Narcissus, he was stupidly convinced that the European Commission would eventually concede, the initiative was abandoned, leaving universities, institutes, and researchers without the expected support.“

Reis installed loyal bum-kissers and slave-drivers, the result is massive fraud. Our article dealt with his predecessor as i3BS President, Manuela Gomes, owner of a massive PubPeer record of fake science. Here is how she reacts to being caught:

Tommaso Rada, Rui L. Reis , Manuela E. Gomes Distinct stem cells subpopulations isolated from human adipose tissue exhibit different chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation potential Stem Cell Reviews and Reports (2011) doi: 10.1007/s12015-010-9147-0 2629-3277 

Gomes announced on this and other PubPeer threads that raw data was largely lost, but the duplications wre “a pure clerical mistake in the assembly of the figure and does not by any mean affect the underlaying data, the experimental results nor the conclusions of the study“. No correction was published because also the journal editors do not care.

But they are scared, especially after our article caused an earthquake in Portugal, there was even some media coverage. More of these pseudoscientists started to reply on PubPeer, sometimes revealing themselves as too dim to even understand what their own figures show:

Ana Rita C. Duarte, Devid Maniglio, Nuno Sousa , João F. Mano , Rui L. Reis , Claudio Migliaresi From honeycomb- to microsphere-patterned surfaces of poly(lactic acid) and a starch-poly(lactic acid) blend via the breath figure method Journal of Applied Biomaterials & Functional Materials (2017) doi: 10.5301/jabfm.5000281

Reis’s former research assistant Ana Rita Duarte, now at New University of Lisbon, replied on PubPeer with: “There is a mistake in the scale bar of Fig 3B which should be in fact 20 um, in accordance with figure 4“. Despite being an ERC-funded “Associate Professor with Habilitation”, she clearly doesn’t understand that the problem of same image showing different experiments cannot be solved by relabelling its size bar… More idiocies by Duarte:

Ivo M. Aroso, Alexandre Paiva , Rui L. Reis , Ana Rita C. Duarte Natural deep eutectic solvents from choline chloride and betaine – Physicochemical properties Journal of Molecular Liquids (2017) doi: 10.1016/j.molliq.2017.06.051 

Duarte ordered us on PubPeer not to trust our own eyes, that “we observe a completely black image” in both cases. Duh, those are not two separate black images, but one image darkened to hide similarities. She has of course much more fake stuff on PubPeer.

It is not clear whose lives Reis’s right-hand man and i3BS Vice-President Joaquim Miguel Oliveira plans to save with all that fraud he published. He also sees his responsibility only to journal editors, here he threw at the PubPeer commenter: “the comment has been already clarified with the journal“:

Le-Ping Yan , Joana Silva-Correia , Cristina Correia , Sofia G Caridade , Emanuel M Fernandes , Rui A Sousa , João F Mano , Joaquim M Oliveira , Ana L Oliveira , Rui L Reis Bioactive Macro/Micro Porous Silk Fibroin/Nano-Sized Calcium Phosphate Scaffolds with Potential for Bone-Tissue-Engineering Applications Nanomedicine (2013) doi: 10.2217/nnm.12.118 

And that would have been an easy duplication to correct, Oliveira’s other papers on PubPeer (mostly with Reis) are much, much faker. These people have no concept of science integrity.

João Cardeira , Paulo J. Gavaia , Ignacio Fernández , Ibrahim Fatih Cengiz , Joana Moreira-Silva , Joaquim Miguel Oliveira , Rui L. Reis , M. Leonor Cancela , Vincent Laizé Quantitative assessment of the regenerative and mineralogenic performances of the zebrafish caudal fin Scientific Reports (2016) doi: 10.1038/srep39191 

Now brace yourself at what Vincent Laizé, group leader at University of Algarve in Faro, shitposted on PubPeer, highlights mine:

“In Figure 2, these images are included exclusively for illustrative purposes to identify and define the different morphometric measurements performed throughout the study in both fixed and live animals. They are not intended to represent distinct individuals and are explicitly cited in the text in association with the corresponding measurement descriptions. These images were selected because they provide a clear visualization of all anatomical features subjected to quantification and do not depict any specific experimental condition.”

Some comments, with clear and objective evidence of image reuse, were inexplicably banned by PubPeer moderation.

Another work by Oliveira, the comments by Carabus maleki were rejected, I reposted the same images and got through:

• Aleksandra Serafin , Mario Culebras , J. Miguel Oliveira , Jacob Koffler , Maurice N. Collins 3D printable electroconductive gelatin-hyaluronic acid materials containing polypyrrole nanoparticles for electroactive tissue engineering Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials (2023) doi: 10.1007/s42114-023-00665-w
• Aleksandra Serafin , Mario Culebras Rubio , Marta Carsi , Pilar Ortiz-Serna , Maria J. Sanchis , Atul K. Garg , J. Miguel Oliveira , Jacob Koffler, Maurice N. Collins Electroconductive PEDOT nanoparticle integrated scaffolds for spinal cord tissue repair Biomaterials Research (2022) doi: 10.1186/s40824-022-00310-5 

The study is actually from the lab of Maurice Collins of University of Limerick in Ireland. The two papers use different nanoparticles to seed their stem cells (GelHA:PPy vs gelHA:PEDOT), but the controls are the same. One could say, so what, the experiments were done in parallel, but there are several issues: the reuse is not acknowledged, the author list is not the same (hence technically plagiarism), and finally: if they ever took one single image for each experimental condition, how do they know it’s meaningful or even representative?

Rui the Drunk is the only common author on the following two papers, the PubPeer moderators rejected both Carabus’s and my comments on the assumption that the alcoholic made those reused diagrams himself:

• Luca Gasperini , João F. Mano , Rui L. Reis Natural polymers for the microencapsulation of cells Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2014) doi: 10.1098/rsif.2014.0817
• Ana H. Bacelar , Joana Silva-Correia , Joaquim M. Oliveira , Rui L. Reis Recent progress in gellan gum hydrogels provided by functionalization strategies Journal of materials chemistry. B (2016) doi: 10.1039/c6tb01488g 

Let’s see if Rui Reis will become untenable and let go, so that he can spend more time with his beloved booze.

Yet even then, the system of bullying and fraud Reis created will stay. Best to close i3BS down, and turn it into something actually useful for the society.

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