Maria Manuel Dias Da Mota PhD, MS

Maria Mota, a native of Vila Nova de Gaia, graduated with her undergraduate degree in Biology in 1992 and received her master's degree in immunology in 1994 from the University of Porto. She received her Ph.D. in molecular parasitology in 1998 from University College London, working at the affiliated National Institute for Medical Research with Will Jarra and Anthony Holder.

Mota moved to the United States after her Ph.D. to a postdoc at the New York University Medical Center in the lab of Victor Nussenzweig.[5] In 2002 she set up her first research group at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal. In 2005 Mota was made a professor at the University of Lisbon. She has been executive director at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) in Lisbon since 2014 and still leads the Biology and Physiology of Malaria research group.

In 2016 Mota was elected a member of EMBO. She is a visiting professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the lab of Dyann Wirth. In addition to her career as a researcher, Mota was the founder and vice-president of the Portuguese science public outreach organization Associação Viver a Ciênci