Our Team

Cristiana Pires was always fascinated by studying human diseases and the development of new therapies. After her Pharmaceutical Sciences degree, she decided to tackle a scientific career and give her contribute. During her graduate studies at Miguel Seabra’s laboratory, Cristiana focused in exploring Cellular Reprogramming strategies to obtain a specific population of retinal cells, the Retinal Pigment Epithelium that can be used to treat retinal degenerative disorders. On January 2016, Cristiana joined Filipe Pereira’s group interested in addressing new perspectives of reprogramming for the development of new therapies for hematopoietic reconstitution and modulation of the immune system. Particularly, Cristiana is very keen to help BRT translating reprogrammed blood cells into new therapies for the patients in need.

Filipe Pereira has long held an interest in understanding how cell identity is acquired, maintained and ultimately modified or reversed. He has made several contributions to the field of cellular reprogramming during his graduate and post-doctoral studies in Amanda Fisher's (London) and Ihor Lemischka’s (New York) laboratories. Filipe Pereira has published 30 papers in high impact journals with over 2,100 citations. He has received fellowships from FCT, EMBO, Revson foundation, Marie Curie, 4 independent travels awards and the Rotary club merit award. Filipe Pereira is currently the group leader of the Cell Reprograming and Developmental Hematopoiesis Laboratory, focused on cell fate engineering and hematopoiesis. He was recently awarded the FCT-investigator starting grant as well as research support from FCT as a principal investigator.

Fábio Fiúza Rosa have developed a strong interest in deciphering how direct cell reprogramming can be used to manipulate immune responses, with the ultimate goal of improving the currently performed immunotherapies. In August 2015, Fabio joined Filipe Pereira’s group as a master student. Here, he developed expertise in the fields of Direct Cell Reprogramming, Hematology and Immunology. During this period he has received two awards and submitted a provisional patent application. Fabio is passionate about entrepreneurship, having participated in several business competitions to help BRT in the process of technology commercialization.