Carla Cruz

Carla Cruz is an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Sciences, Chemistry Department of University of Beira Interior. In 2017, she was awarded with a highly competitive FCT Investigator contract (IF/00959/2015) as Assistant Researcher. She is the GROUP LEADER of G4Lab (https://gquadruplex.wixsite.com/ccruz) at CICS-UBI, establishing her independent research line since 2015. Currently, her team has by 1 post-doc, 6 PhD students and 7 MSc students. During her scientific career, she supervised until completion 2 post-docs, 2 PhD, 30 MSc and 23 BSc students, plus 14 other students with research grants. She has also experience in committee members of PhD and MSc theses, as well as on committees for research fellowships under projects and for the acquisition of equipment. Her RESEARCH TOPIC is focused on drug design, development and delivery, as well as on the optimization of biophysical/cellular and molecular methods to study nucleic acids, including DNA/RNA G-quadruplex (G4) structures, aptamers and protein targets towards cancer research. This has been RECOGNIZED by the scientific community, having more than 80 articles (+ 2 under revision), 44 in the last 5 years, being the first and/or corresponding author in more than 80% of those papers, in addition to 2 patents and over 150 conference presentations, including 33 oral communications and more than 20 invited talks. She is/was the PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR of 15 national/international projects and a Member of 6 other funded projects (ICON_CENTRO-010145-FEDER-000013, NANOGLIO, PUREmiRSILs, CICS4COVID, CovidOUT, COMBINE). Since 2021, she is COORDINATOR of the Biopharmaceuticals and Biomaterials group at CICS-UBI, a Member of its Executive Board, Coordinator of PTNMR infrastructure integrated in European INSTRUCT-ERIC infrastruture at CICS-UBI (PINFRA/22161/2016) funded with 6.3 MEur, and Coordinator of the International PhD Program in NMR Applied to Chemistry, Materials and Biosciences (PD/00065/2013) at UBI. She belongs to the Management Committee of COST Action CA17140 (Nano2Clinic) and she is a Member of COST Action CA17013 (Delivery of Antisense RNA). She collaborated with several International Institutions all over the world, through published papers, funded projects and joint supervision of students with FCT grants, namely with MIT, Univ. Texas at Austin, Penn State College of Medicine, IECB-Univ. Bordeaux, Institut de Biologie Structurale Grenoble, Autonomous University of Madrid, Ecole Polytechnique Paris, Univ. Santiago de Compostela, Univ. Burgos, Univ. Ferrara, ETH Zurich, and Univ. Barcelona. She has also collaborated with the CRODA-UK and LABFIT companies and with the CHUCB and HUC hospitals, in additional to the following Portuguese Institutions: IPATIMUP, INESC-MN, IST-C2TN, REQUIMTE/LAQV Univ Aveiro, UCIBIO FCT NOVA, and CITAB-UTAD. She was a visiting scientist at Univ. Strasbourg (with Dr. S. Ladame), IECB-Univ. Bordeaux (with Dr. JL. Mergny and Dr. G. Salgado), Penn State College of Medicine (with Dr. Craig Meyers), Magnetic Resonance Center (with Dr. Marco Fragai) and National Centre for Biotechnology (with Dr. Leonor KREMER). Her outreach activities include being a speaker at Hospitals, Cancer Day, Science Week, newspapers, radio (Antena 1) and TV interviews. She was also the organizer of Advanced NMR courses at UBI.