VII Jornadas de Genética e Biotecnologia

Joana Simões Correia

 

Affiliation: Center for Neurosciences and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, Portugal

 

     Joana Simões Correia is graduated in Chemistry of Biological Processes by the University of Coimbra (2003), and a PhD in Human Biology by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (2009), as part of the PhD Program GABBA (Graduated Program in Areas of Basic and Applied Biology). She has been trained in national and internationally renowned institutions during PhD and as a Postdoc, such as IPATIMUP (Porto, Portugal), the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB, Belgium), and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona, Spain) where she has been an EMBO fellow.

     She has published several peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals such as Human Molecular Genetics, PNAS and Gut and is invited reviewer of Plos One, EJHG and Cancer Genetics journals. She is often invited to give lectures in Graduations, Masters and PhD programs from University of Coimbra, Porto and Braga, and has been the supervising Master and PhD students from different universities. She is specialized in the biology of cell-cell communication and has made major contributions for our understanding of the role of direct cell adhesion in cancer development.

     As an Assistant Researcher in the Center for Neurosciences and Cell Biology (Coimbra, Portugal), she is focused on distant cell communication, especially when mediated by extracellular vesicles. She is developing new therapeutic tools for regenerative medicine, based on the findings of her research on cell communication. In this context, she is acting as the major promoter of an entrepreneurial project selected by the accelerator COHITEC (from Cotec), and plans to found a company during 2015. This project was selected as one of the seven most promising entrepreneurial projects of the year, which also granted seed funding from Caixa Capital.