Research

I'm currently wrapping up the publication from my doctoral work in the Beraneck lab. Alongside that, I'm directing the skills I have learned thus far — project ownership, cross-team coordination, communication, and comfort with complex problems — toward my next step.

Drawn to spatial cognition, I moved to Paris for my PhD at the École Normale Supérieure in the Lena/Popa lab to study how vestibular inputs (the body's sense of motion and balance) shape our internal sense of direction. I was fully involved in all axes of the project, from hypothesis to experimental design to execution.

Alongside the research, I joined Stories of Women in Neuroscience, a project amplifying the voices of women researchers from diverse backgrounds, research fields, and career stages.

I completed additional training in Computational Neuroscience through the Neuromatch Academy, which focuses on the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning using state-of-the-art modelling approaches.

Before starting my PhD, I stayed at the Champalimaud Foundation as a Research Assistant in a newly formed Alves da Silva lab. I coordinated multiple research projects at once, worked across a diverse team, and mentored students, while also driving my own project on action initiation in Parkinson's disease.

This was the period that taught me how I actually operate best. The technical skills (such as microsurgery, coding and behavioral paradigm optimization) mattered, but the real growth was in orchestration: keeping several projects moving in parallel, aligning different people, and holding the whole picture.

I chose a research-heavy MSc at NOVA Medical School in Lisbon specifically to go deep on the lab work. I worked across models (cells, flies, rodents) approaching neurodegenerative disease from a molecular angle, before landing my thesis project at the Costa lab at the Champalimaud Foundation (now at the Allen Institute in Washington).

There I started a new project on how motor-skill learning reshapes plasticity in motor circuits, running the behavioral experiments in mice, building the data-analysis pipelines, and developing microscopy expertise. I built the project's foundation from the ground up, and the work I set up became the basis of a funded grant I co-authored.

My path started from the simple motivation of wanting to understand how living systems work. I earned my BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Lisbon, but I didn't wait to finish the degree to start doing the work: I interned across academic and industry labs to find where I fit, and it was in one of them that neuroscience caught me for good. This time is also where I first started communicating science in public, volunteering at outreach events, starting a thread that runs ever since.