Sara Xapelli is an Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa (FMUL), Portugal. During her PhD Sara studied the neuroprotective and antiepileptic role of neuropeptide Y and neuroinflammatory molecules that can modulate neuroprotection or neurodegeneration. Her PhD work was performed at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), University of Coimbra, Portugal; at the University of Southern Denmark, Denmark and at the University of Alberta, Canada.
In 2008 Sara started her first postdoc at CNC, concerning the study of modulators of neural stem cells to promote postnatal neurogenesis. In October of 2011 Sara started a second postdoc at Instituto de Medicina Molecular (iMM), where she implemented the research field of neural stem cells. Since December of 2016 Sara is a Senior Staff Scientist at iMM and since May of 2018 she is an Assistant Professor at FMUL. The main objective of her research group is to find modulators of neural stem cells that can boost adult neurogenesis and oligodendrogenesis.