By Valkyrie Gibson
Boston University News Service
A fast-talking head pops up on the screen, infiltrating the routine funny cat videos, epic fails and sports commentary we’re so accustomed to seeing during hours of mindless scrolling.
Hands point to images displayed in the background, as an excited-eyed, curly brown haired man captivates his audience. His face fills the screen as he leans in as far as possible to prove whatever point he’s making and draw our attention away from the blur of videos we’re so easily sucked into.
Daniel Dahis, a lead scientist at the startup company BioDevek, which works toward innovative surgical solutions, started posting about science on his Instagram account after he gained attention from the CEO of a Brazilian pharmaceutical company. In just six months, his account has exploded online and continues to rapidly expand.
Now, he’s consistently making content in Portuguese to explain scientific concepts to people in Brazil, his home country.
“At the beginning, I wanted to talk in Portuguese because I think for Brazil, which is a developing country, it’s so important to have references showing that science is a valuable way to make a living and to change the world in some way,” Dahis said.
A study from 2023 analyzed scientific publication output in South American countries and found that research there faces limitations due to low budgets, poor infrastructure and expensive materials. This is in addition to language barriers between researchers in South American countries and researchers in places including the United States and Europe, where more papers are published.
Since expanding his Instagram account, Dahis said he’s already experienced meaningful interactions with his followers. After posting multiple videos on microplastics, small plastic pieces that are cited as a possible cause of cancer, he said that some of his followers have reached out to him to say they’ve switched from using plastic cutting boards to ones made of wood or glass after watching his videos on the subject.
When people message him, Dahis said he feels a responsibility to answer scientific questions transparently.
When a follower direct messaged the scientist to ask if CRISPR, a gene editing technology, could be used to treat cancer, he said that he couldn’t just shoot back a reply without doing additional research first. While Dahis said he knew the answer was “yes,” he always double checks his information.
“I feel that people look at someone with a PhD with this sort of like, ‘Oh, this guy knows,’ which is not true,” Dahis said. “Of course, I cannot know everything. But still, it means that I have a responsibility to give the right answer, or at least the closest to the truth answer.”
Before his rise to fame on social media, Dahis started his science career like many others: undergraduate school. As a student studying electrical engineering, Dahis dove into various projects, including breast cancer modeling where he developed an algorithm to infer whether babies are hard of hearing. These experiences led him to pursue a master’s degree, and then a doctorate, in biomedical engineering at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
Just when Dahis was deciding what to do next after his master’s program, a guest professor from Harvard University changed the trajectory of his life.
He said he was enthralled by Natalie Artzi’s research talk, daring to ask after the lecture if he could join her lab as a graduate student. Despite her decline to his request, citing his lack of academic papers and experience as an issue, Dahis persisted.
About six months later, he attended a conference in Virginia to present his research and reached out to Artzi to let her know. She invited him to present a seminar to her lab at Harvard while he was on the East Coast.
In one of the most nerve-wracking moments of his life, Dahis worked out a collaborative agreement to work with Artzi and his principal investigator back at the Technion to complete his PhD — but without his PI’s initial knowledge. And while his PI “was pissed at first,” Dahis made him see reason. He argued that getting to work with Harvard is a great opportunity to gain visibility and make collaborative connections.
During his time as a doctoral candidate, Dahis developed his teaching skills by instructing undergraduate students. He saw his work as building scientists, not just completing a project.
Mariana Alonso Riquelme, a former mentee of Dahis’s from the Artzi lab, said how much he valued the people he was working with.
“He’ll think of something and be like, ‘The next day we’re trying it, even if it fails, it doesn’t matter. We’re trying it,’” Riquelme said. “And some people would look at him like he was crazy.”
Seeing Dahis plow through complications helped Riquelme develop her own problem-solving skills.
Years later, Dahis still has that drive as he continues to go after things when the opportunity arises.
When the Brazil Conference, a yearly event hosted by Harvard and MIT that seeks solutions for Brazilian challenges, brought João Adibe Marques, the CEO of a well-known Brazilian pharmaceutical company to the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, Dahis gave Marques and his family a tour.
Following the meeting, Marques took a picture with Dahis and posted it to his Instagram. The CEO’s millions of followers flocked to the young scientist’s page.
Seeing the impact a large name could have on his reach, Dahis ambitiously asked a Co-CEO of another major pharmaceutical company, Cimed, to re-post his content. Not stopping there, another attendee of the conference, a famous Brazilian TV presenter, also gave Dahis a shout out after meeting. This combination shot Dahis from just 1,200 followers to over 100,000 in less than a year.
This summer I worked as an intern at one of the other startup companies in the Life Lab and I witnessed Dahis’s excitement over the steady increase of his new followers. Any day we passed each other in the lab or were doing our experiments in the same space, he was sure to tell me how many followers he had.
Even though his followers will likely help his career in the future, he’s not just excited about the fame. He’s mostly excited about science itself.
“He’s always asking other scientists about their work,” said Arlette Cabral, an intern at BioDevek who works under Dahis. “He was late one time to meet up with me because he stopped in the hallway to talk to somebody about what they were up to science-wise.”
At 32, Dahis is influencing Brazilians, and anyone else he comes across along the way, to ask better questions and think critically about science.
“I got this feeling that what I do does not only belong to me,” Dahis said.
Becoming a role model for Brazilians has given Dahis the opportunity to show them what’s possible.
Dahis said: “If they see, ‘Oh, look at that Brazilian, he’s in Harvard doing research,’ [their dreams are] much more feasible and achievable.”
