Marta Alenquer
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Testimony
With a background in Biological Engineering (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal), my scientific career has been guided by my interest in host-pathogen interactions. Following an internship in Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) under the supervision of Prof. Johan Thevelein, where I studied nutrient transport and signalling in Saccharomyces cerevisie, I joined the lab of Prof. Isabel Sá-Correia (Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences, Lisbon, Portugal) to investigate molecular mechanisms of resistance to antimalarial drugs, using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a eukaryotic model.
My fascination with virology led me to join iMM to pursue a PhD in gammaherpesvirus research (Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, 2005-2010). During my PhD, supervised by Prof. Pedro Simas, I focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms employed by murid herpesvirus-4 to establish latent infection in mice. This project was partially developed at Dr Philip Stevenson’s lab (University of Cambridge, U.K.). During this period, I was also a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Medicine (Universidade de Lisboa), having organised and taught the Microbial Pathogenesis and the Virology practical courses.
After a brief post-doc at Prof. Pedro Simas lab, where I continued researching the interaction between latent gammaherpesviruses and host B lymphocytes, I joined the group of Dr. Maria João Amorim (Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal) in late 2013 to study the interplay between influenza A virus genome particles and host cell factors. Since 2018, I am a contracted researcher at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, where I have been involved in several projects focusing on influenza A virus-host cell interaction. Also, since March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been developing projects aimed at facilitating the diagnosis and studying the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination.
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