I have a BSc in Biology from the University of Coimbra, Portugal and a MSc in Biotechnology Engineering and a PhD in Endocrinology, both from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain. I was awarded a PhD Fellowship from FCT and completed my doctorate in 2015 with cum laude honour and a prize to the best thesis of the year in health sciences at the USC. My PhD work was developed at Prof Carlos Diéguez and Dr Miguel López NeurObesity lab, under the ERC Starting-grant project ObERStress (€1.5M, ERC). I explored the central networks behind the action of BMP8B, revealing it as a thermogenic protein that acts on the nervous system and in BAT activating the thermogenic machinery of brown adipocytes resulting in the loss of white adipose tissue and reduction of body weight. This work resulted in two first and co-first author papers in Cell and Cell Reports. In that period developed international collaborations with researchers from the universities of Cambridge (UK), Barcelona (Spain) and Bergen (Norway), studying how antipsychotic drugs, Estrogens and Ghrelin regulate feeding, regulate BAT thermogenesis, and modulate the accumulation of WAT impacting obesity, and how specific lipid species act on the nervous system to control whole body energy homeostasis. My substantial contribution to these works granted me co-first authorship in papers in Diabetes, PLOS ONE, Int Journal of Neuropsycopharmacology, and mid-authorship in papers in Cell Metabolism and Endocrinology. In 2015 I secured a Postdoctoral Training Scientist position funded by the United Kingdom Medical Research Council to work with Prof. David Carling at the MRC-LMS Imperial College London. I worked on an international project (UK/Sweden) with the pharma company AstraZeneca as part of their program to develop AMPK small molecule activators for combating metabolic disease and obesity. There, I developed new adipose tissue-specific genetic mouse lines to study the effect of activation of the energy sensor AMPK in vivo. I was also responsible for the lab implementation of primary adipocyte culture protocols and the Oroboros respirometry technology to study adipose tissue metabolism. This work contributed significantly for a paper in Nature Metabolism as second-author that revealed a novel mechanism that protects against diet induced obesity by changing the morphology of white adipocytes in a process resembling browning. I have also explored the effect of AMPK activation is specific regions of the brain and was invited speaker to talk about this work at the 2019 26th European Congress on Obesity in Glasgow, UK. At this stage, I also mentored 1 MSc and 2 PhD students. In 2019 I joined ICVS/3B’s at the University of Minho, Portugal, to work with Dr Alexandra P. Marques, first with a Postdoctoral fellowship supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant ECM_INK (€2M, ERC) and later as a Junior Researcher. I worked with Cell sheet technology developing an in vitro model of obese white adipose tissue from primary Human Derived Adipose Stem Cells. This work was presented at TERMIS 2022, by a PhD student I am co-supervising, showing that a 3D model of obese adipose tissue can be achieved using cell sheets. Also, lipidomics analysis showed that dietary lipids are a key factor in in vitro model development. I have also been working on in vitro models of rare skin diseases using cell sheet technology. In two articles in preprint, one as first and corresponding author, I have explored proteomic analysis to show that cell sheet technology is a valid tool to model rare skin diseases, and that in diverse epidermal diseases dermal fibroblasts are affected and share common ECM disorganization patterns. During this period I became mentor of 3 PhD students and co-supervisor of 1 PhD student. Additionally, I was responsible for developing Proteomics and Lipidomics analysis of in vitro models and manage the Electrophoresis and Western Blot Laboratory.