John Lopes Email & Phone Number

Who I am, what is my passion and my field:I am a skilled biologist with a passion for applied research, and I am a firm believer in the use of plants as an essential source of nutrition, cosmetics, and medicine. Through sustainable mining of our plant resources, several effective commercial products can be generated to improve the quality of life for animals and humans. This approach can help build the knowledge economy, through collaboration of scientists with business professionals across different disciplines to create novel high quality and safe food, cosmetics and health products from natural resources based on reliable science, which can improve health while generating revenue through various industries and markets.Therefore, I left academia in 2019 to start a science consultancy (JJ Science consultants), with the aim to provide science related services to the industry. One of my clients was a cosmetics company in South Africa named African Secret, for which I provided the following services:• Identification of plants for product development.• Planning of experiments to validate the use of identified plants in planned products.• Identification of laboratories to execute the research strategies planned.• Planning of budgets and writing of funding proposals to execute the research.At the end of 2021 I moved from South Africa to Spain (to join my wife) and unfortunately African Secret terminated our collaboration and consequently I closed JJ Science Consultancy.My greatest strengths and accomplishments:My greatest strengths are my curiosity, determination, ability to integrate information across disciplines and think out of the box to find solutions to scientific puzzles. These strengths proved essential for optimizing conditions (in my laboratory at Stellenbosch University while working in academia) to isolate adult cardiomyocytes from rat hearts to culture and use in experimentation, and finally optimizing methods to analyse the cells. It is noteworthy that the isolation and especially culture and experimentation of adult cardiomyocytes are extremely difficult procedures, and therefore adult cardiomyocytes are not commonly used in most cell-based cardiovascular research laboratories.Expertise:Planning of quality experiments, interpretation of data, excellent observation and troubleshooting skills, good writing skills, project planning, budget planning, project management, ability to communicate complex topics in simple language, team worker