2010 PhD delegates
Pedro Lima
Ines Trancoso
Ali Ozgur Argunsah
Marisa Oliveira
Rui Castanhinha
Alex Leitao
Bruno Afonso
The organizing committee
Like every year, the AMeeGuS retreat is organized by seven PhD students who represent the PhD student community in 2010. Introducing...
Pedro Lima | e-mail | lab
I´m a biologist currently interested in the evolution of plants. I´m using pollen tubes as a cellular model to mechanistically address major transitions occurred in the ontogeny of plants that evolved around 250 MY ago. I joined the IGC in 2007 and entered the PhD programme last year.
Ines Trancoso | e-mail | lab
After discarding dolphin trainer, contemporary dancer and impressionist painter careers, I have followed my hunch for Human Molecular Biology. I've graduated at Faculdade de Ciências, Lisbon and my Masters focused in Immunology, mainly in V(D)J recombination and genomic instability. I am now a first year PhD student and I seek to understand the epigenetic layer of regulation preventing this tumourigenic process.
Ali Ozgur Argunsah | e-mail | lab
I am Ali as in "there!". I studied Biomedical Engineering in Baskent Uni., Ankara, Turkey. Then I did my master on Electronics Engineering and Computer Science in Sabanci Uni., Istanbul, Turkey. During my undergraduate and graduate studies, I worked on Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal acquisition
and EEG signal processing for EEG based Brain Computer Interfaces. I moved to Portugal in 2009 for my Ph.D. Now I am a member of Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme.
Marisa Oliveira | e-mail | lab
I studied Biomedical Engineering in Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal. The multidisciplinary background that I received completely changed my way of approaching science and biology to an integrative and broad perspective. Currently my main interests are in the study of biophysical mechanisms of development. I’m focusing in size regulation in Drosophila where I would like to integrate genetics, physiology, physics and evolution.
Rui Castanhinha | e-mail | lab1 | lab2
Dinosaurs, Embryos and Evolution. These are my three passions. At the moment, I am using avian dinosaurs (chick embryos) as a model to understand how can symmetry be regulated along vertebrates development
Alex Leitao | e-mail | lab
I was born in Lisbon but I spent my childhood on the other side of the river in Almada (however, always looking at Lisbon). I graduated in Biology at Faculdade de Ciências where I chose to focus my studies in Evolution and Development. Currently I am in the first year of my PhD studying the cellular immune system of D. melanogaster.
Bruno Afonso | e-mail | lab
I studied Evolutionary Developmental Biology in the University of Lisbon and I did my masters on the same field. I worked in bacterial quorum-sensing, a mechanism of systemic gene expression regulation through population density that most bacteria show. Also, I worked on mutation rate estimation improvements in bacteria. Now I am doing my PhD in something completely different and my interest is to unvravel biological mechanisms of behaviour variation in a population, i.e., to know what mechanisms drive variation in a given behaviour between individuals.