Maria De Lourdes Pereira

Maria Lopes received her MSc degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Aveiro (Portugal) in 2015. Her master thesis was focused on the characterization of the glial scar tissue, regarding hyaluronic acid spatio-temporal distribution and metabolism, in a mice model of compressive spinal cord injury. The work was developed at the Molecular physiology research unit of the University of Namur, Belgium. From 2016 to 2018 she was involved in a project with focus on the biochemical and histological effects of gold nanoparticles in Sparus aurata, in the Professor Maria de Lourdes Pereira Lab, at the University of Aveiro. Then, between 2019-2020 she was a master fellow in the Neuronal Networks Laboratory at the instituto de investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S), Porto, where she was involved in the project ‘’pre-and postsynaptic interactions between afferents supplying lamina I projection neurons in the lumbar and cervical spinal cord: impact for somatic pain and migraine’’, in wich lumbar and cervical projection neurons were labelled by a retrograde tracer into their supraspinal projection areas enabling its morphologic characterization by histological and immunohistochemical techniques. Currently, she is a PhD student in Prof. João F. Mano COMPASS Research Group at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, where she is particularly focused on bioengineering bioinstructive soft supramolecular multilayer patches based on the layer-by-layer assembly technology, combining neural extracellular-matrix inspired materials and nanotopography, towards neural tissue engineering application, i.e. spinal cord repair.