Biography
I am a science communicator with a strong research background in biology. Currently, I am an Invited Professor at the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal and a researcher at ICNova. My work focuses mainly on searching for strategies to debunk fake news about science and to communicate evolution. I graduated in Biology from the University of Lisbon and this was followed by a path in evolutionary biology research: I was a visiting student at the University of Rochester NY (1997-1999) and a visiting scholar at Harvard University (1999-2003), where I developed the research for my Ph.D. Back in Portugal, I received a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Lisbon and was a postdoctoral fellow at cE3c, Lisbon. In parallel with research, my interests in communicating science to wider audiences led me into participating and organizing science communication activities. I took a Masters in Science Communication (NOVA University, Lisbon) and did an internship at the science section of the daily newspaper Público. From 2019 to 2023 I was vice-leader of a working group of a COST Action (EuroScitizen - building in Scientific Literacy in Evolution in Europe) a project devoted to finding best strategies to improve science literacy. I am currently leading a work package in an Erasmus+ project (SchoolFaN - Schools against Fake News for a cooler future), a project to empower school teachers to develop a citizen science Project to detect and debunk fake news related to climate change. I am also a freelance science writer and science news fact checker — I find that writing about science is as exciting as doing science.