Mariana Gomes de Pinho studied Applied Chemistry at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She started her research studying career mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, in the Laboratory of Prof Hermínia de Lencastre, at the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica (ITQB NOVA), Oeiras.
Mariana continued these studies with Prof. Hermínia de Lencastre during her PhD, for which she moved, in 1997, to the Laboratory of Prof Alexander Tomasz at The Rockefeller University, in New York. In 2001 she became interested in understanding where and how proteins localize in the bacterial cell and joined the Laboratory of Prof Jeff Errington in the University of Oxford, UK, to work on this subject as a post-doctoral fellow.
After 8 years abroad she decided to return to Portugal and in 2006 started her own research group, the Bacterial Cell Biology Laboratory, at ITQB NOVA. In 2012 Mariana was awarded an ERC starting grant and in 2017 an ERC consolidator grant, both to study cell division and antibiotic resistance of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. She is the mother of three girls, aged 16, 13 and 9 years old, and is happy to combine her roles as scientist and mother.
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