About me

I received my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Sciences, at the University of Algarve, where I had the chance to learn the concepts and techniques of medical science and molecular biology. There, I was exposed to diverse areas of research and interacted with several scientists. The most interesting part of that training was my final project, a scientific report in breast cancer genetic susceptibility with Ana Teresa Maia. I continued onto the MSc in Oncobiology, at the same time that I was working at the Functional Genomics of Cancer Group on the identification of new genetic risk markers for breast cancer and the cis-regulation of somatic mutations also in breast cancer.

I spent the summer of 2016 as a visiting worker in the group of Daniel Gaffney at the Sanger Institute, working on a map of histone Quantitative Trait Loci (hQTL) in induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs) from the HipSci consortium.

I then joined Nuno Barbosa Morais's computational biology group at Instituto de Medicina Molecular (IMM) to do my Master’s thesis, focusing on the molecular mechanisms underlying tumour development. In parallel, I was involved in multiple collaborations involving studying the role of lncRNAs in cancer, the impact of cancer-associated DNA variants on splicing deregulation, and using large-scale pharmacogenomics data to identify natural compounds, and their respective targets, with novel therapeutic potential in cancer.

In 2018 I joined the lab of Alex Stark Lab, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), to do my PhD. There I used deep learning approaches and massively parallel reporter assays to understand the cis-regulatory information encoded in the sequence of transcriptional enhancers.

In the summer of 2023 I joined InstaDeep as an AI Research Scientist, where I am building large language foundational models for biology.

My ultimate goal is to build computational models that can read the human genome and interpret its variation.

I love science and I do sports in my spare time!

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do!” Steve Jobs