Plenary Speakers
Professor Víctor de Lorenzo
Prof Victor De Lorenzo is a lead researcher within the Systems Biology Program at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CSIC) in Madrid. His current research focus involves deep engineering of soil bacteria both as cell factories for industrial biotransformations and as agents for environmental bioremediation and valorisation of toxic waste. Other areas of research include environmental microbiology, metabolic engineering, Pseudomonas putida biology and biotechnology, gene expression regulation, synthetic (micro)biology, and global warming.
Invited Speakers
Sónia Melo
Sónia Melo's expertise involves exosomes biology, pancreatic cancer and in vivo models of disease. She has trained as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA and MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA, as an EMBO and Human Frontiers Fellow. She heads an independent research line at I3S since 2015, and she is the coordinator of pre-clinical research in the Porto Comprehensive Cancer Center Program since 2020. She was distinguished with the Best ImmunOncology Project Award by AstraZeneca Foundation, a National Cancer Crowd Funding and the UNESCO-L’Oreal Prize for Women in Science.
Agostinho Antunes
Agostinho Antunes is a Portuguese biologist specializing in evolutionary genomics and bioinformatics. Agostinho is Associate Professor at the University of Porto and he also leads the Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics team at CIIMAR, focusing on comparative genomics, molecular evolution, and conservation genetics. He has contributed to major international projects, including sequencing a 47,500-year-old scimitar-toothed cat genome and developing tools for the Earth BioGenome Project. He has also participated in European initiatives like ShareBiotech and the H2020 IGNITE network, focusing on comparative genomics of non-model invertebrates.