This program provided me with a full week of seminars and practical training followed by a full month internship in the intersection of two different research teams: the Complex Adaptive Systems and Computational Biology team led by Professor Luis Rocha and the Inflammation team led by Professor Miguel Soares. Here I developed a Boolean Network on two distinct informatics platforms to study how Lipolysis influences the outcome of Sepsis and vice-versa.

During this Internship, I accompanied closely the CPIRN team led by Professor Paula Coutinho. I was introduced to the WasteSilk project, financed by FCT, and performed, under the supervision of Elisabete Costa, different scientific research and protocol validation for bioactive compounds extraction (sericin and fibroin) and cell culture techniques supporting the in vitro assays for evaluation of bioactivities of materials and compounds. I also performed works whose goal was to isolate Sericin and Fibroin the components of silk.

This internship introduced me to research practice and the CPIRN team’s different activities. I developed a clearer idea of what it means to be a scientific researcher. I participated in the biosynthesis of metallic nanoparticles by microalgae and macroalgae extracts, and different techniques for the characterization of nanoparticles, namely Dynamic Light Scattering. This work was developed as part of the project ALGALUP, financed by INTERREG, and led by Prof. Paula Coutinho.