“A living showcase of biomedical engineering.”

As a lifelong dreamer, I wanted to become a medical doctor in high school. Saving lives and making a difference in a hospital setting - that was the goal. But life had other plans.

Ended up graduating (BSc & MSc) in Biomedical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, Lisbon, Portugal), specializing in imaging, biosignals, and biomedical instrumentation.

Side-quested alone for 6 months at Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU, Copenhagen, Denmark), as part of the Erasmus Programme (MSc, 1st year).

Came back to IST and started working on fascinating projects, including my Master’s Thesis, where I studied the role of cytoskeletons and nuclei of cancer cells during cancer invasion and progression.

Fell in love with my work and realized I could make a difference, maybe not in a hospital setting as I initially dreamed, but in cancer research (and biomedical engineering in general).

Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) thought so too, so I had the priviledge of receiving two research grants to pursue my research at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa) and at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), in collaboration with Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde da Universidade do Porto (i3S).

Fueled by infinite motivation, I'm currently taking my PhD at IST to continue my work, after being awarded a 4-year-long fellowship by FCT.

Along the way, I joined outreach and dissemination activities promoted by IST and ISR, contributed to teaching in the Biomedical Engineering BSc at IST, attended several national and international meetings, created research projects in ofthalmology, and supervised students across diverse projects in biomedical engineering.

Right now, I’m a visiting researcher at the Wirtz / Wu Lab at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU, Baltimore, USA).