Gonçalo Cotovio, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist and clinical researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, working at the intersection of psychiatry, neuroimaging, and circuit neuroscience. Within the Foundation's Neuropsychiatry Unit and Digital Neurotherapeutics Centre, he leads the clinical and translational development of transcranial magnetic stimulation and serves as an Assistant Professor at NOVA Medical School, the Medical School of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He earned his medical degree there in 2014, joined the Champalimaud Foundation as a research intern in 2015, completed his PhD in Biomedicine in 2023, and finished his psychiatry residency in 2024. His research uses lesion network mapping to identify causal brain circuits underlying neuropsychiatric syndromes, translating those insights into more precise, individually targeted neuromodulation strategies. Cotovio's contributions span lesional mania, lesional obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), biomarkers of cortical excitability, and clinical applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation for mood disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2023, he received a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant to advance work on lesional OCD and circuit-informed treatment development, including the Neuropsychiatry Unit's first clinical trial using therapeutic transcranial magnetic stimulation. His career has been shaped by mentorship at the Champalimaud Foundation under Professor Albino J. Oliveira-Maia, Head of the Neuropsychiatry Unit, as well as through international collaborations and training periods, including at Harvard Medical School with Professors Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Michael D. Fox and Dr. Daniel Press. The defining feature of his current role is the daily opportunity to bring together the identities of clinician and researcher, asking mechanistic questions while remaining close to the therapeutic needs that should ultimately guide the science. His ambition is to help move psychiatry from descriptive associations toward causal circuit models that can inform treatment, refining how clinicians select targets for neuromodulation, stratify patients, and interpret heterogeneity in psychiatric disorders. Across these themes, Cotovio advocates a scientific culture that combines excellence with fairness, protecting space for careful, curiosity-driven work, rewarding team science across disciplines, and keeping patients and clinical relevance at the center of research. In this Genomic Press Interview, he discusses his scientific journey, his current program at the interface of causal circuit mapping and non-invasive brain stimulation, and the values that shape his practice as a clinician-scientist committed to translating mechanistic discovery into better care for patients with severe psychiatric illness.