Dr. Lourival Domingos Possani Postay, a Mexikói Nemzeti Egyetem professzorának díszdoktori avatása a Debreceni Egyetemen 2005. június 4.
Professor Lourival Domingos Possani Postay has presently Mexican nationality, but was born and educated in Brasil. He got his Ph.D. degree on Molecular Biophysics at the University of Paris and received postdoctoral training in Biochemistry at the Rockefeller University in New York. He became professor at the National University of Mexico in 1974. He decided to study the structure and function of scorpion toxins, due to the high number of accidents caused by scorpion stings in the country. In his 1982 Nature paper he described the first peptide toxin effecting potassium channels.
He supervised the theses of 62 students, published 201 articles, with more than 3,600 independent citations. He has eight patents of inventions approved. He is member of the "Consultative Counsel of Science and Technology" of the President of Mexico, from whom he received the National Science and Arts prize in 1996. For ten years he was an international scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He spent time as visiting professor in several universities incl. Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA, and Max Planck Institute, Germany, the latter with an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship.
He has collaborated with members of the Biophysics and Cell Biology Department in Debrecen since 1988. The joint work contributed to several articles and three already defended Ph.D. dissertations, as well as to a currently running Hungarian-Mexican joint grant-program.