After my undergrad, I decided to pursue a masters degree that allowed me the opportunity to explore the field of neurosciences. By joining Prof. Francisco Cruz lab at the Faculty of Medicine of Porto, I was able to study the neural mechanisms involved in the micturition control, and the consequences that could arise upon bladder dysfuntion. During this time, I was offered a research fellowship as part of a European project entititled “Combating incontinence, from basic science to clinical practice”, that gave me the opportunity to work in closely with clinical collegues. Following my master degree, I obtained a doctoral research fellowship allowing me to investigate the contribution of neurotrophins, including Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) and Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), to overactive bladder (OAB) using two animal models: chronic cystitis and spinal cord transection (SCT).

After being awarded my PhD in 2013, I joined Dr. Andrei V. Krassioukov group in ICORD, Vancouver, as a postdoctoral researcher in order to pursue my interest in spinal cord injury and neurodegeneration. During this period, I was awarded a grant of the Rick Hansen Foundation to conduct a project that evaluated the effects of chronic high-level spinal cord injury on bowel dysfunction in rats. The findings have contributed to a publication and at the same time, I have assisted my fellow colleagues in their projects with my expertise in spinal cord injury animal surgery and histological assessment.

In 2016, I moved to Prof. Daniel Marcellino lab in the University of Umea. There I had the opportunity to investigate the dynamics of brain structural plasticity during learning processes and the possibility of dopamine as an important link between changes in central myelination and Parkinson’s disease in vivo. For that, I gained experience with the procedures necessary to perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in mice.

In 2019, I moved to UCL and joined Prof. Tammaryn Lashley’s lab as a post-doctoral research fellow. This group holds great experience in neuropathology and has published significantly in the area of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases. I joined the lab to run the PET imaging investigations, which would call upon all of the skills that I had previously established from my PhD. We have perfomed head-to-head comparisons of different tau radiotracers that are or could be used for PET imaging in the clinical setting to distinguish between several neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, we are exploring the suitability of the next generation neuroinflammation PET tracer [¹⁸F] DPA-714, depicting activated microglia, as a biomarker for early diagnosis and disease progression in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). In addition, I am driving an independent project based on pathological observations of the protein SRSF2. The protein has been identified in tau pathological inclusions and has a role in tau splicing. This important observation could have a huge impact on the tau field in how other proteins are involved in the formation of the tau inclusions seen in the tauopathies.