Beatriz Guapo Neves, MSc

Beatriz Guapo Neves graduated in Biological Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in January 2021. She has since developed most of her research in the stem cell field in (inter)national institutes. Throughout her degree and professional career, she has participated in several activities regarding science communication and public outreach. She is currently awaiting her next international experience to begin! In 2020 she enrolled as an MSc student in the Erasmus+ Placement programme at the Stem Cell Institute of KU Leuven (Belgium). Her MSc thesis aim was to study the role of one of the genes from the Base Excision Repair pathway in Bone Marrow (BM) Hematopoietic Progenitor Stem Cells (HPSCs) in vitro and in vivo by eliminating that gene in primary mouse HPSCs, using a CRISPR-Cas9 approach. In January 2022, she joined the Institute for Clinical and Biomedical Research (iCBR), where she established a human induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (hiPSC) culture line from the ground. She successfully differentiated it in some hiPSCs models, such as hiPSC-derived ECs, and hiPSC-derived RPE. During this period, she also joined the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology campus in Cantanhede (CNC-UC), where she performed some experiments with cancerous cell lines, such as glioblastoma, osteosarcoma, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Since January of 2023, she is currently working as a Research Fellow in CICECO (Compass Group), combining stem cells with biomaterials. Her work involves mesenchymal stromal cells and their secretome to study their immunoregulatory potential.