Many congratulations to Dr. Cláudia Fernandes for successfully defending her PhD work last friday evening, 29^th May 2020.

Her thesis is entitled "Exploring affinity for the development of novel biomaterials", supervised by prof. Cecília Roque and co-supervised by Dr. Ana Pina and Dr. Tiago Fernandes.

The ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo, scheduled to happen on 22-26th March in Philadelphia, has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though we could not be physically present, we could still submit and present a poster, which can be seen here: https://doi.org/10.1021/scimeetings.0c02867

Gabriela is an undergraduate student in Pharmacy and Biochemistry from USP - University of São Paulo, Brazil. She will be working closely with Manuel Matos on the production of novel affinity adsorbents towards antibodies. During her stay, Gabriela will enhance upstream and downstream processing of novel ligands discovered from combinatorial libraries.

Guilherme is our new Research Assistant in the SCENT project. He has a Masters degree in Micro and Nanotechnology Engineering from FCT-NOVA and did his master thesis in the University of Aalborg (Denmark), in the "Development of a microfluidic platform for dielectrophoretic separation of polymeric nanoparticles".

Sabrina arrived this week and is staying in our lab until March 2020. She is Brazilian, born in São Paulo, and is beginning the 3rd year of her bachelor degree in Pharmacy – Biochemistry in USP. She will be working closely with Manuel Matos on the production of novel affinity adsorbents towards antibodies. Antibodies and related fragments are important tools in biotechnology context due to their potential as therapeutic and imaging agents.

Fernando Nunes, our last master student in the group, finished today successfully his Master in Bioorganic Chemistry.

Arménio Barbosa was the main supervisor and Cecília Roque co-supervisor. The work developed during the thesis was mainly in computational chemistry and related to “Molecular properties of VOC sensing materials”.

Congratulations Fernando! We will miss your usual cheer and joy at the lab. 

Today it was Beatriz Mariz day! She just finished with much success her Master in Biochemistry with the thesis “Artificial fluorescent phosphatase enzyme”. Ana Pina, the supervisor, Cecília Roque, co-supervisor, and the rest of the group could not be more happy for her.

We wish you all the best Bia, it was great to meet, work and have fun with you.