I am a PhD student at the ICVS, School of Medicine/University of Minho, Portugal. I graduated in biochemistry in 2016, with the final research trainee at ICVS. In 2018 I obtained a MSc in Health Sciences from the School of Medicine University of Minho. My MSc work focused on the study of new combinatory therapies for Parkinson's Disease using Mesenchymal Stem cells secretome and Glial cells. I started my PhD in 2019 where I focused on understanding neural basis of motivation involving expertise in calcium imaging. In particular I am interested in understanding how the brain processes positive and negative stimuli. More specifically, I am interested in identifying and characterizing the neuronal ensembles representing rewarding and aversion, ranging from exposure to natural rewards (e.g. food) or drugs of abuse (e.g cocaine), to exposure to foot shock. We are trying to understand the anatomical and functional specificity of reward- and aversion-responsive ensembles in the NAc. So far, we evaluated D1- and D2-MSN activity in the NAc during Pavlovian conditioning, by recording calcium activity, through 1-photon miniaturized microscopes, of NAc neurons during positive/negative Pavlovian conditioning. This approach allows us to better understand how NAc neurons respond during associative learning. To date, I published 16 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals; I have published as first author in journals such as Translational Psychiatry and Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences and have published several others as co-author as a result of collaborations with colleagues and other research groups. I co-supervised 3 laboratory rotations of undergraduate students.