Marco Santos was a postdoctoral researcher from São Paulo whose innovative work on emotion recognition across diverse ethnic populations contributed important data on the universality and cultural specificity of affective processing. He arrived at the Institute in 2001 and quickly established himself as a meticulous experimentalist, running large-scale studies that examined how facial expressions are interpreted in different cultural and linguistic contexts. His collaborative approach and generous mentorship of junior students made him a beloved member of the Institute community. In 2005, Santos accepted a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of São Paulo, where he founded the Social Affective Neuroscience Lab and has trained a generation of Brazilian researchers in cross-cultural emotion science.