Maria R. Nunes Soares

Rita Soares is a PhD student in the Molecular Biology Department of Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes, Universidade de Lisboa. She obtained an Integrated Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, allowing her to get a consistent background in different scientific areas from molecular biology to mathematics and programming.

During Rita’s master (2015), she worked with rat adult neural stem cells exploring their capacities to boost the production of neural cells for brain repair strategies. As a PhD fellow (2017-present), she has been interested in studying how mitochondrial processes regulate the fate of mice adult neural stem cells. To accomplish this, she has been using in-house well established neurosphere cultures where neural stem cells are obtained from the neurogenic regions. Beyond the neurosphere cultures, she masters different laboratory tecniques including in vivo surgeries, Western Blot, confocal and wide-field microscopy. During her training, Rita has had the opportunity to present her work in several international meetings including an EMBO course and a CELL Symposium.

Rita Soares won the first prize of a Business acceleration program in Health the StartHealth@ULisboa. She also received five Mobility Grants, one from the International Brain Research Organization and four from international projects such as the TwinnToInfect and SynaNet projects.