Valéria Dos Santos Custódio Email and Phone Number

I hold a BSc in Biology from Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal), an MSc in Biochemistry from Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) and a Master in Research (MRes) from the University of Nottingham (UK).Currently, I’m a researcher at the University of Nottingham (UK) and about to finish my PhD in Molecular Biology at ITQB-NOVA (Portugal). My work mainly focuses on disentangling the microbiota's role in promoting plant growth using maize as a working system. As a researcher, I’ve unravelled microbial and environmental cues in regulating maize development by utilising a combination of culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches, reductionist microbial synthetic communities (SynCom) strategy and analysis of layers of omics datasets. This approach allows me to develop skills in:- RNA and DNA library preparation- Transcriptome analysis- Synthetic ecology and microbiome analysis- Whole genome library preparation- Genome assembly and annotation- Real-time quantitative PCR- Next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis- Microscopy and image processing- Built and maintained reproducible high-performance computer (HPC) bioinformatic workflowsAdditionally, I’m also working on personal projects in Data Science to gain experience solving business problems and developing my data analysis tools skills. I’m finishing a personal project that aims to use a regression algorithm from machine learning to determine the price elasticity of different technological products. Lastly, I’m using SQL and PowerBI to help an E-commerce company extract insights from the data.