Pulido Valente Science Awards ceremony 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 Prize aims to distinguish the best work published in an area of Biomedical Sciences (without restricting the year of publication) that describes research carried out by a researcher under the age of 35 in a national laboratory. The amount of this prize is 10,000 euros, to be awarded annually, and is shared equally by the Professor Francisco Pulido Valente Foundation and the Foundation for Science and Technology.

In 2019, the Pulido Valente Science Prize was aimed at the area of Public Health - Non-Biological Determinants of Health and was awarded to researcher Ana Filipa Antunes, with 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. This researcher's work aimed 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 has also been a researcher at the Lisbon Institute of Global Mental Health and the Comprehensive Health Research Center (CHRC), Nova Medical School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. 

The Pulido Valente Science Prize 2020 was aimed at the area of Oncological Diseases - Tumors as ecosystems of clones and cells: therapeutic implications. Researcher Sara Rocha was awarded the prize 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 received 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 - Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde, 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 awards ceremony will be part of a program intended to pay tribute to Professor João Monjardino, a doctor, 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 died 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 a strong connection to Portugal. He was the founder and member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Professor Francisco Pulido Valente Foundation since it was set up in 1991, and was the driving force behind the Pulido Valente Science Prize, which was established in 2003.

See the program of the session.