Patrícia RD Coelho is a PhD student from FMUC, UC being part of the Doctoral Program in Health Sciences since 2022. Patrícia has both a BSc (since 2016) and MSc. (since 2018) degree in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology from Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. During her undergraduate studies, she became curious in studying how different organisms have different behaviors and levels of cognition. Therefore, she developed her Master Thesis under the supervision of Dra. Catarina Homem, at CEDOC, Nova Medical School. There, she was involved in the study of neural stem cell determination, where she optimized a whole brain live cell imaging technique and further studied the balance between proliferation and differentiation of Drosophila melanogaster neural stem cells (NSCs). The work developed helped the characterization of these NSCs, as well as the understanding of how these cells terminate their proliferation. She obtained a Master Research Fellow (MindGAP H2020/FET-Open project) in the field of Biomaterials at Biomark@UC to develop a novel portable biosensor device able to capture brain extracellular vesicles involved in mind/body interactions. Moreover, she also gained three Research Fellow grants (financed by European Huntington's Disease Network - EHDN, and HealthyAging 2020) to work at Mitochondria and Neurodegenerative Disorders group at CNC.UC, headed by Dra. Ana Cristina Rego, studying the impact of scaffolding proteins in cortico-striatal glutamatergic synapses in the context of Huntington's Disease mitochondrial dysfunction, using different mice-derived models. Apart from that, she was also involved in several other research projects in.Recently, she obtained a FCT-funded PhD fellowship to study inter-organelle communication in Parkinson's disease. Patrícia RD Coelho attended and presented her work at several national and international scientific meetings (e.g., selected poster oral presentation sessions), was part of the organizing committee of the meeting Sociedade Portuguesa de Neurociências 2022 and was awarded a YSF and 48th FEBS Congress attendance and travel grant (2024). Additionally, has experience in the supervision of students (e.g., 1 master rotation, 2 BSc supervisions and 2 MSc co-supervisions), and was Jury at 2 BSc Thesis defenses (supervisor). She authored and co-authored several review articles and Book chapters, as well as co-authored original articles. Also, Patrícia has multiple conference abstracts published. Patrícia Coelho has experience in electrochemical and respirometry techniques, biochemistry and molecular techniques (e.g. Western Blotting, qPCR, PCR, in situ hybridization), immunocytochemistry, immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence, as well as maintenance and manipulation of several model organisms (e.g. fruit fly, mice and chicken embryos). Moreover, she has expertise in isolation and culture of (i) whole brain samples (in fruit fly) and (ii) primary cellular cultures of both striatal and cortical areas (in mice). She has a vast knowledge in single-cell analysis, mitochondrial characterization techniques, long-term live imaging techniques and microscopy (fluorescence and confocal - laser scanning and spinning disk imaging) as well as data treatment (GraphPad) and video and image analysis (ImageJ and Adobe Photoshop).