Dentist, with experience in oral surgery and implantology, a medicine student, to embark on maxillofacial surgery, a doctorate student, and an investigator in the Health Investigation and Innovation Institute (I3S), Rodrigo Val d’Oleiros created Orgavalue, a startup that is revolutionizing the bioengineering field with an innovating technology for organ substitution.
Rodrigo Val d’Oleiros is eternally restless, moved by dissatisfaction with the social, educational, and cultural realities in Portugal. From an early age he knew that he wanted to be a doctor, but in the 12º grade things changed. “I dropped out of school at the end of high school because I got conflicted with the type of teaching that I found. I was frequently focused on the transmission of knowledge in a patterned way and the evaluations were made on a numeric scale, which seemed reductive to me and did not reflect the students’ true essence of knowledge or intellectual capability. I did it all by exam and then I, obviously, did not get a high enough grade to get into Medicine”, he explains in an interview with DentalPro.
Still, he was not very far. He got into Dental Medicine at the Faculty of Dental Medicine of the University of Porto, much by his aunt’s inspiration, Anabela Val d’Oleiros, who is also a dentist, and a model to be followed by Rodrigo. The student had hopes that the University was a space of profound transformation and learning but was again faced with a “reality that did not match his expectations”. “At the Faculty of Dental Medicine, I learned how I did not want to be. By reflecting on my passage there I understand that the academic environment, paradoxically, taught me more about what not to aspire to be rather than what to follow. At that time, I was hoping that the professors would be inspiring mentors, figures who not only transmitted technical knowledge, but guided the students through the complex entanglement that is medical practice, with wisdom and ethic”.
All these dissatisfactions instigated Rodrigo to “search for knowledge and growth in other environments”. It was then that he found the i3S, “a haven” for his will to know more, “a place where scientific investigation presented itself as the foundation for innovation and progress. There, I could get involved with brilliant and dedicated minds, that shared a commitment to excellence, of mutual aid and with the real notion of learning”, he says.
Read the whole interview in the DentalPro 176.
