Biography
From a very early age Ana João Rodrigues loved to ask questions and discover new things. Today Ana is an accomplished Portuguese scientist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minho School of Medicine in Portugal, still going out to her work with the enthusiasm of a child on its way to the toy store.
Ana has graduated from the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) with a diploma in Applied Biology and consequently did her PhD in at the University of Minho, Portugal and at David Geffen School of Medicine - UCLA, USA. Her research is focused on unravelling how the human brain encodes rewarding and aversive events to drive motivated behaviours and how it computes whether a stimulus is “good” or “bad”. She says she is spending her days using her own neurons to understand how neurons work, yet she confesses she rarely thinks about what goes on inside her own head.
Ana describes herself as emotional, impulsive, and insisting on keeping some naivety. And she has one great merit:
Many scientists, while not having published their data, try to be discrete as they fear of being scooped. But I tell everyone everything: what I did, how I did it, what data I got. Maybe I'm a little naive, but I believe that science should be open and inclusive.
Having obtained international experience in a few leading laboratories in the US and Europe (Holland, Portugal, Italy and Finland) Ana is currently the Team leader and Assistant Professor to the ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho. Her motivation for research has become even higher in the past two years after her work was recognized and financed with two prestigious research grants (one from the European Research Council, and another from the Foundation “la Caixa”), which supported her research of neurons and how they process information to attribute a positive or negative valence.
photo: maisguimaraes.png
Having obtained international experience in a few leading laboratories in the US and Europe (Holland, Portugal, Italy and Finland) Ana is currently the Team leader and Assistant Professor to the ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho. Her motivation for research has become even higher in the past two years after her work was recognized and financed with two prestigious research grants (one from the European Research Council, and another from the Foundation “la Caixa”), which supported her research of neurons and how they process information to attribute a positive or negative valence.