Speakers

Miguel Castanho is the Head of the Department of Biochemistry of the School of Medicine of the University of Lisbon and Group Leader at GIMM - Instituto Gulbenkian para a Medicina Molecular, which is part of the Lisbon Medical Academic Center. The goal of Miguel Castanho’s group is to unravel the physical principles that govern interactions at the molecular level of clinically relevant compounds with model cell systems animal and models, with the objective of developing new drugs, as well as improving the understanding of the mechanism(s) of action of established drugs. Miguel Castanho has expertise in the design and study of membrane-active peptides with anti-infective and anticancer activities using experimental methods developed in-house, as well as structural biology approaches. One of the main focuses of his research group is the study of peptide drugs or peptide-drug conjugates able to transmigrate across the Blood-Brain-Barrier and target enveloped viruses, bacteria or breast cancer brain metastases in the Central Nervous System. He was the coordinator of the international consortium NOVIRUSES2BRAIN (European Innovation Council; FET-OPEN, Grant 828774) and participates in two European Commission-funded consortia (EvaMobs and AVITHRAPID) under the call HORIZON-HLTH-2023-DISEASE-03-04. Miguel Castanho published over 220 papers. 

José R. B. Gomes is a computational chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Porto whose career has progressed from postdoctoral research in Barcelona to a leading role at the University of Aveiro/CICECO, where he has contributed to the development of computational chemistry research and infrastructure. He has made significant contributions to multiscale modeling methodologies, including the development of reactive coarse-grained models such as sticky-MARTINI, as well as force fields and machine-learning tools for materials modeling. His research spans adsorption, catalysis, sensing, and, notably, the computational design and understanding of MXenes and other advanced materials. With around 275 publications and an h-index of 51, he has secured major funding, supervised numerous researchers, and served the community as co-founder of the Computational Chemistry Group of the Portuguese Chemical Society (SPQ) and as Associate Editor of RSC Advances. His distinctions include the Vicente de Seabra Medal by SPQ, and the Teresa da Fonseca and Mendonça Monteiro awards from the University of Porto.