Pulido Valente Science Awards Ceremony for 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 p.m. at the Thalia Theater in Lisbon, and will be broadcast online at this link.

The Pulido Valente Science Award aims to recognize the best published work in the field of Biomedical Sciences (regardless of the year of publication) that describes research carried out by a researcher under the age of 35 in a national laboratory. The prize is worth €10,000 and is awarded annually, with equal contributions from the Professor Francisco Pulido Valente Foundation and the Foundation for Science and Technology.

In 2019, the Pulido Valente Science Award focused on the area of Public Health – Non-Biological Determinants of Health and was awarded to researcher Ana Filipa Antunes for 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. The aim of this work was to compare changes in socioeconomic position indicators during the economic recession in Portugal, starting in 2008, between people with and without mental disorders. Ana Filipa Antunes has been 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, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. 

The 2020 Pulido Valente Science Award focused on the field of Oncological Diseases—Tumors as Ecosystems of Clones and Cells: Therapeutic Implications. Researcher Sara Rocha was named 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 consisted of studying the impact of 3D cellular architecture on the content and function of extracellular vesicles (EVs) produced by gastric cancer cells. The researcher recently obtained her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology applied to Health Sciences from the BiotechHealth Program (ICBAS, University of Porto). Her doctoral thesis, developed at i3S – Institute for Research and Innovation in Health at the University of Porto, in the “Expression Regulation in Cancer” group, was dedicated to studying 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 iMM (Lisbon) and INL (Braga), the University of Freiburg (Germany), and LUMC (Netherlands).

The award ceremony will be part of a program that pays tribute to Professor João Monjardino, a physician, leading researcher in the field of virology, and member of the founding committee of the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICBAS) at the University of Porto, who passed away on October 31, 2019, in London, at the age of 83. Although he had lived in the British capital for several decades, he always maintained strong ties with Portugal. He 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.