Pulido Valente Science Awards Ceremony 2019 and 2020

Tomorrow, June 15, the Pulido Valente Science Awards Ceremony will be held for the winners of the 2019 and 2020 editions, starting at 2:30 pm, at the Thalia Theater in Lisbon, and will be broadcast online at this link.

The Pulido Valente Science Award aims to distinguish the best published work in an area of Biomedical Sciences (without restriction of the year of publication) that describes research carried out by a researcher under 35 years old in a national laboratory. The amount of this prize is 10 thousand Euros, to be awarded annually, and is shared equally by the Professor Francisco Pulido Valente Foundation and the Foundation for Science and Technology.

In 2019, the Pulido Valente Science Award was directed to the area of Public Health - Non-Biological Determinants of Health and was awarded to the researcher Ana Filipa Antunes, with her work "Changes in socioeconomic position among individuals with mental disorders during the economic recession in Portugal: a follow-up of the National Mental Health Survey", which was published in the journal Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. This researcher's work aimed to compare the changes in socioeconomic position indicators during the economic recession in Portugal, from 2008, among people with and without mental disorders. Ana Filipa Antunes is an epidemiologist at IQVIA, since 2000, and was also a researcher at the Lisbon Institute of Global Mental Health and Comprehensive Health Research Center (CHRC), Nova Medical School, New University of Lisbon. 

The Pulido Valente Science 2020 Award was directed to the area of Oncological Diseases-Tumors as ecosystems of clones and cells: therapeutic implications, and the researcher Sara Rocha was distinguished as the winner of this edition, for her work "3D Cellular Architecture Affects MicroRNA and Protein Cargo of Extracellular Vesicles", which was published in the journal Advanced Science. Her research was to study the impact of 3D cellular architecture on the content and function of extracellular vesicles (EVs) produced by gastric cancer cells. The researcher is a recent PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology applied to Health Sciences by the BiotechHealth Program (ICBAS, University of Porto). Her PhD thesis, developed at i3S - Institute for Health Research and Innovation of the University of Porto, in the group "Expression Regulation in Cancer", was dedicated to the study of the interaction between tumor cells, extracellular vesicles and immune cells, and how these interactions contribute to cancer progression. Throughout this project she worked in national and international laboratories of excellence, such as the iMM (Lisbon) and the INL (Braga), the University of Freiburg (Germany) and the LUMC (Netherlands).

The awards ceremony will be part of a program that aims to pay tribute to Professor João Monjardino, physician, leading researcher in the area of Virology and member of the establishment committee of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences Abel Salazar (ICBAS) of the University of Porto, who died on October 31, 2019, in London, at the age of 83. Although living in the British capital for several decades, he always maintained a strong connection to Portugal, was a founder and member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Professor Francisco Pulido Valente Foundation, since its establishment in 1991, and was the driving force behind the Pulido Valente Science Award, established in 2003.

See the session program.