Biologist, researcher, teacher

I am a biologist from Lisbon who has spent the better part of two decades moving between the lab bench and the classroom. They turn out to be the same job: take something complicated, work at it until it makes sense, then hand it on to someone else.

For the last few years, teaching has been the front of that work. 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, research took me through an unreasonably wide range of living things: fish, microalgae, ticks, parasites, viruses and people, and the molecular machinery running underneath all of 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. Along the way I ran the lab I worked in, managed projects, and — earlier, and rather differently — managed the coastline of Cascais.

More recently I have been widening the toolkit rather than narrowing it: 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 running through all of it is the one that took me into biology in the first place. I want to understand how a system actually works, and then make it work better.

I am at my best around people, building things, and working on something nobody has quite figured out yet — and teaching gives me all three at once. It is the work I am proudest of, and I intend to keep doing it. Alongside it, tech and biotech, operations and management are where I expect to do good work next. The CV has the full record, and the science and design pages show what I actually made.