Session Chairs
Public Health & Clinical Research
Firmino Machado is a medical doctor specialized in Public Health, with a Master's degree in Statistics and a postgraduate degree in Health Unit Management. He completed his PhD in Public Health, with research focused on optimizing oncological screening programs. Additionally, he completed the Clinical Scholars Research Training program at Harvard Medical School.
Currently, he is a guest associate professor at the University of Aveiro, Vice-President of the Egas Moniz Clinical Academic Center, and Consultant to the Board of Directors of the Vila Nova de Gaia/Espinho Hospital Center. He works as a researcher at the University of Porto's Institute of Public Health in the field of cancer epidemiology and serves as Director of the Early Phase Clinical Trials Unit at CHVNG/E.
He has published over 40 scientific articles in PubMed-indexed journals and has received 8 awards at scientific conferences. He has supervised 8 Master's theses and is currently supervising 3 doctoral theses.
Firmino Machado, MD PhD
Session 1
Rui Vitorino, PhD
Session 2
Miguel Pais-Vieira, PhD
Session 3
Sandrina Nóbrega Pereira, PhD
Session 4
Daniela Ribeiro, PhD
Session 5
We will guide our symposium's discussions, foster collaboration, and ensure a dynamic, engaging experience throughout the event!
Omics & Bioinformatics
Rui Vitorino is a Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at the Department of Medical Sciences (DCM)-iBiMED, University of Aveiro. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry in 2004. Vitorino has a background in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics, namely: characterization of the proteome of biofluids and peptidomics for the analysis of biological samples, especially saliva and urine, to identify the molecular pathways underlying disease phenotypes; exploration of bioactive peptides from saliva (BP) for therapeutics and services. This science-based knowledge has been applied to assessment and multidisciplinary and combinatorial approaches of protein enrichment, gel-based/gel-free and bioinformatics to reveal the biological processes regulated by a given condition. Clinical translation of his findings will be possible through the definition of multimarker panels for early disease detection and risk assessment and the development of point-of-care technology.
Biomedical Therapeutics
Miguel Pais-Vieira is an Assistant Professor at department of Medical Sciences, iBiMED - Institute of Biomedicine, University of Aveiro, Portugal. He has completed his PhD in Human Biology with Professor Vasco Galhardo at the University of Porto, Portugal; and then he did his Postdoctoral training Neurophysiology and Neuroengineering in the Laboratory of Professor Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University, USA.
​His current line of research is focused on brain-machine interfaces for sensorimotor integration and rehabilitation in humans. This approach combines the use of real-time analysis and decoding of neural activity (namely EEG) to control devices (such as an exoskeleton or an avatar in a virtual reality environment) while the user receives multimodal feedback (visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal).
Molecular & Cellular Mechanisms: Organic Systems
Sandrina Nóbrega Pereira concluded a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Coimbra (2003) and a PhD in Biology, specialization of Cell Biology in 2009 from the same University with work conducted at Oscar Marin lab (Instituto de Neurociencias, Alicante, Spain). Sandrina made an extensive post-doc training in Cancer Metabolism, Ageing and Stem Cells Biology first at the CNIO (Madrid, Spain) at Manuel Serrano lab (2009-2013) and subsequently at the iMM-JLA (Lisbon, Portugal) at Sérgio Dias and MCFonseca labs (2013-2021). In 2020, she joined the University of Aveiro/iBiMED as Assistant Researcher, where she has been developing work in nutrient and metabolic signaling driving cell plasticity in Cancer and Regenerative Biology.
Immunology and Host-Microbe Interactions
Daniela Ribeiro graduated in Biochemistry at the University of Porto in 2001. She obtained her PhD degree in 2007 at Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and was afterwards appointed as Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). In 2010 she joined the University of Aveiro as a Postdoctoral researcher and, in 2016, was appointed Invited Assistant Professor at the Department of Medical Sciences. In 2018 Daniela was awarded an Assistant Researcher position (CEEC2017) at iBiMED.
Daniela is the group leader of the Virus Host-Cell Interactions Laboratory, where it is studied different aspects of the interplay between viruses and their host cells, such as: the role of peroxisomes and other intracellular organelles in the antiviral immune response and viral propagation; the interplay between viruses and cellular proteostasis; the impact of tRNA modifications and translation control for pathogenicity and host responses to viral infections.