I am a PhD student in Health Sciences at ICVS, with a research focus on neuroscience. I have a bachelor’s degree in Applied Biology (School of Sciences, University of Minho), having worked briefly in the field of oncology studying the role of WNT6 in a murine in vitro model of glioblastoma during my internship project.
I completed a master’s in Health Sciences (School of Medicine, University of Minho), having defended my dissertation – “Valence in the Nucleus Accumbens – Identifying Neural Populations in Appetitive and Aversive Responses” – under the supervision of Ana João Rodrigues and Carina Soares-Cunha. I studied how neuronal populations in the nucleus accumbens and amygdala subnuclei respond to positive and negative valence stimuli – a topic I am still exploring. For this, I use anatomically-detailed immunofluorescence and behavioural assessments (such as place preference tests) combined with aversive and appetitive stimuli and optogenetics. More recently, my work also involves implementing a variety of high-throughput techniques (proteomics, single cell RNA-sequencing, calcium imaging) to more comprehensively study this topic. Our team’s work allowed for co-authorship in 4 published journal articles (Cell Reports, IF: 7.5; Translational Psychiatry, IF: 5.8; Journal of Neurochemistry, IF: 4.2; Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, IF: 4.1) and in two posters presented at the international FENS Forum 2022.