Patrícia R.D. Coelho is a Ph.D. student at MIA-UC and FMUC-UC, enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Health Sciences since 2022. She is a member of the Organelle Crosstalk in Aging and Disease Group, led by Dr. Nuno Raimundo. Patrícia holds both a B.Sc. (2016) and an M.Sc. (2018) in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. During her undergraduate studies, she became interested in understanding how different organisms exhibit distinct behaviors and levels of cognition. Consequently, she pursued her Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Catarina Homem at CEDOC, Nova Medical School. There, she contributed to the study of neural stem cell determination, optimizing a whole-brain live-cell imaging technique and investigating the balance between proliferation and differentiation of Drosophila melanogaster neural stem cells (NSCs). Her work contributed to the characterization of these NSCs and improved the understanding of how they terminate proliferation. She was awarded a Master Research Fellowship (MindGAP H2020/FET-Open project) in Biomaterials at Biomark@UC, where she worked on developing a novel portable biosensor device capable of capturing brain extracellular vesicles involved in mind-body interactions. Additionally, she received three Research Fellow grants (funded by the European Huntington's Disease Network - EHDN and HealthyAging 2020) to work in the Mitochondria and Neurodegenerative Disorders group at CNC.UC, led by Dr. Ana Cristina Rego. In this role, she investigated the impact of scaffolding proteins on cortico-striatal glutamatergic synapses in the context of Huntington’s disease-related mitochondrial dysfunction, using various mouse-derived models. Beyond this, she participated in several other research projects within the lab. Recently, Patrícia was awarded an FCT-funded Ph.D. fellowship to study inter-organelle communication in Parkinson's disease. She has presented her work at several national and international scientific meetings (e.g., selected poster and oral presentations). She was also part of the organizing committee for the Sociedade Portuguesa de Neurociências 2022 meeting and received a YSF and 48th FEBS Congress attendance and travel grant (2024), winning the Best Poster and Best Daily Poster awards, respectively. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the newly established Junior Section of the Portuguese Society for Biochemistry. Patrícia also has experience supervising students, including one master’s rotation, two B.Sc. students, and two M.Sc. co-supervisions. Additionally, she has served as a jury member for two B.Sc. thesis defenses (as a supervisor). She has authored and co-authored several review articles and book chapters, as well as co-authored original research articles. Furthermore, she has multiple published conference abstracts. Patrícia has expertise in electrochemical and respirometry techniques, as well as biochemical and molecular biology methods (e.g., Western blotting, qPCR, PCR, in situ hybridization). She is also skilled in immunocytochemistry, immunohistochemistry, and immunofluorescence. Her experience extends to the maintenance and manipulation of various model organisms, including fruit flies, mice, and chicken embryos. Additionally, she has expertise in isolating and culturing (i) whole brain samples (Drosophila) and (ii) primary striatal and cortical cell cultures (mouse). Her technical skills include single-cell analysis, mitochondrial characterization techniques, long-term live imaging, and advanced microscopy techniques (fluorescence, confocal laser scanning, and spinning disk imaging). She is proficient in data analysis using GraphPad and image/video analysis with ImageJ and Adobe Photoshop.