I am a Junior Researcher at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Medicine, University of Minho (Portugal), where I study the neural circuits that support motivation, learning and adaptive behavior. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry (2016) and an MSc in Health Sciences (2018) from the University of Minho. This experience shaped my interests and motivated my focus on the neural circuits that drive behavior. I completed my PhD in September 2024, where I explored how nucleus accumbens (NAc) circuitry shapes motivated behavior and learning. In this work, I used electrophysiology and optogenetics to examine how anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) projections to key reward-related nodes—the NAc and the ventral tegmental area (VTA)—contribute to effort-based motivation in both physiological conditions and animal models of motivational impairment.

In parallel, I studied how the NAc encodes rewarding and aversive information during Pavlovian learning. Using miniaturized one-photon calcium imaging, I tracked D1- and D2-medium spiny neuron activity as animals experienced rewards or aversive outcomes and learned their predictive cues. I found that D1 and D2 populations are co-recruited during both appetitive and aversive learning. Importantly, when contingencies changed, D2 neurons showed stronger adaptation and optogenetic experiments provided causal evidence that D2 neurons are required for the extinction of aversive associations— work that culminated in a first-author publication in Nature Communications.