Since 2012 I am a member of the laboratory of prof. Margarida D. Amaral, at the Faculty of Science University of Lisboa (FCUL), and am actively involved in the field of Cystic Fibrosis (CF). My research focuses in understanding the regulation of the intracellular traffic of CFTR, the protein involved in cystic fibrosis. Using cell and molecular biology tools I aim at generating knowledge which will leverage the development of novel and effective therapeutic drugs for CF patients. For this purpose, I have specialized in cell biology, membrane trafficking and high throughput microscopy at EMBL Heidelberg (DE) by visiting the Advanced Light Microscopy facility from 2012-2013, within the scope of collaborative efforts with the laboratory of Dr. Rainer Pepperkok.

One of the challenges in CF research is to predict the response of CF individuals to the drug-like molecules researchers create in the lab with a high degree of accuracy. I believe that advanced cellular models, highly representative of human tissues, can contribute to overcoming this hurdle. I am developing cellular assays based on cell lines and intestinal organoids to investigate the activity of wild type and mutant CFTR through microscopy imaging, and using them as tools to identify new CFTR-targeting molecules and understanding CFTR activation mechanisms.

Some of my previous work consisted in performing high content siRNA-based screening in CF cellular models at near genomic scale to identify genes regulating CFTR traffic in the cell. This involved the creation of a complete set of workflows for high-throughput microscopy imaging, automated image analysis routines (ImageJ, CellProfiler) and data science analysis (R, Python).

I often engage in interdisciplinary research with scientific collaborators. By leveraging my expertise in imaging, I have screened natural bioactive products, studied small molecule inhibitors of metastization in breast cancer models, analyzed novel molecules for cancer theranostics, profiled cellular responses to fatty acid metabolism disorders, disected the energetic metabolism of S. aureus, analyzed the bactericidal properties of biocompatible surface coatings, and more.

I am co-responsible for FCUL's Microscopy Facility and I manage the High-Throughput Screening Facility at BioISI, a research infrasturecture for spectroscopy- and image-based screening. I am in charge of supporting academic and corporate users in screening projects focused on drug discovery or functional genomics (siRNA screening), bioimage analysis, data processing and data storage.

• Cystic Fibrosis
• High Content Screening
• Microscopy
• Bioimage analysis
• Biomedicine
• Drug development
• Cell Biology
• RNAi
• Functional genomics
• Software development
• Data science
• Core Facility management