Catarina Castanheira Coutinho

In 2016 Catarina conducted a 5 month internship at IMDEA Nanociencia, in the group of Prof. Álvaro Somoza, where she developed nanobiosensors based on gold nanoparticles for the detection cancer‑related miRNAs. In 2017, Catarina started her Master Dissertation project at the Nanomedicines & Translational Drug Delivery group in i3S/INEB (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Heath / Institute of Biomedical Engineering), University of Porto, supervised by Dr. José das Neves and Dr. Bruno Sarmento. There she developed functionalized polymeric nanoparticles for the topical delivery of anti-HIV microbicides. Catarina obtained her MSc Degree in Bioengineering – Molecular Biotechnology in October 2017 and after that, she continued her work at the Nanomedicines & Translational Drug Delivery group. In March 2018, driven by her interest in inorganic nanostructures for diagnostics and therapy, she came back to IMDEA as a visiting student. In April 2019, she started to work as a technician in the RENIM project to modify magnetic nanoparticles with different molecules for diagnostics and imaging. Since September 2019, she is carrying out her PhD, with an AECC fellowship, under the supervision of Prof. Álvaro Somoza and Dr. Milagros Castellanos. Her work focuses on the use of gold nanoparticles for cancer diagnosis and gene therapy.