Biologist, researcher, teacher

I am a biologist from Lisbon. For the better part of two decades I have worked between the lab bench and the classroom. Both come down to the same thing: take something complicated, work at it until it makes sense, then explain it clearly to someone else.

Teaching is the front of that work now. I teach and tutor biology and the sciences in Portuguese and in English — from middle-school Ciências Naturais and Físico-Química, through Cambridge IGCSE, AS and A Level Biology and Marine Science, up to molecular and cell biology at university level. I have done it at a Cambridge international school in Cascais, at a private school in Campo de Ourique, and now I am at a public Portuguese school, Escola Gil Vicente in Graça, Lisbon.

Before that I worked on a wide range of organisms — fish, microalgae, ticks, parasites, viruses and people — and on the molecular mechanisms behind them. I worked on ovary development in tilapia at the Centre of Marine Sciences in Faro, on photosynthesis and photo-oxidative stress in diatoms at BioISI, on tick-borne pathogens at the Institute for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and finally on human helper T cell differentiation and TCR signalling as a PhD candidate in Systems Biology, where I put RNA biology, transcriptomics and computational logical modelling to work on the same question. Five papers and seven conference posters came out of it. I also managed the lab I worked in, ran projects, and, earlier, managed the coastline of Cascais.

More recently I have broadened my toolkit: Google certifications in Data Analytics and in Project Management, a C programming bootcamp at 42 Lisboa, and the data-analysis habits that R gave me during the PhD. The thread is the same one that took me into biology. I want to understand how a system actually works, and then make it work better.

I work best with people, building things, and on problems nobody has solved yet — and teaching gives me all three. It is work I am proud of. I am also looking for the next step in biotech and pharma laboratories, quality and laboratory operations, where research training and project management count. The CV has the full record, and the science and data analysis pages show some of what I actually made.