Inês Marques is a research assistant working in the Gut-Brain axis group at CNC-UC, University of Coimbra. She completed her undergraduate education in Biology at the University of Coimbra in 2022, during which she was awarded a Scientific Initiation Grant by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) to study enteric mitochondrial dynamics in a Parkinson's disease mouse model. She then recently graduated from the MRes in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at Imperial College London (UK) in 2023, where she focused her studies on bacterial competition in the gut (project 1) and T cell activation dynamics (project 2). With a background in microbiology and immunology, she is currently interested in studying how the gut microbiome shapes host health and disease, specifically in the context of gut-brain immune dynamics. She has experience in a variety of techniques such as bacterial and mammalian cell culture, retroviral gene transduction, qPCR, flow cytometry, tissue sectioning and confocal microscopy. Moreover, she co-authored four research publications, one book chapter, three poster presentations and inclusively received a second place award for a first-author poster presentation.