2003 – Graduation in Applied Biology
2008 – PhD at University of Minho, Portugal (Patricia Maciel’s Lab) and at David Geffen School of Medicine – UCLA, USA (Dan Geschwind’s lab)
2008 – 2013 Post-doctoral fellow at ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho, Portugal (Nuno Sousa’s lab)
2014 – Team leader at ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho

My research is focused in unravelling how our brain encodes rewarding and aversive events to drive motivated behaviors.
How do our brains compute that a stimulus is “good” or “bad”? How is valence represented in the mammalian brain? What are the neural substrates underlying a rewarding or an aversive experience? What lies between the stimulus and the behavioural response?
On top of these exciting fundamental neuroscience questions, I am also exploring how early life stress in specific developmental windows can imprint long-lasting marks in these processes, leading to maladaptive behaviours (depression, addiction).
In the last years, my team has been allying fundamental with clinical research, combining rodent and human data, using a variety of techniques to find mechanistic explanations on how reward and aversion are encoded in the mammalian brain (rodents – in vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics, calcium imaging, behavioral evaluation; humans – fMRI, neuropsychological evaluation).

In addition to my scientific and teaching activities, I am also one of the Science Outreach Coordinators of host institution, responsible for science dissemination for the society.