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Meet Adriana Gonçalves

1.    Tell me in 5 words who is Adriana Gonçalves?
#creativity #tolerance #wanderlust #science #motherhood

2.    What made you join CeMM?
I was one of the first PhD students to have joined CeMM. I felt an immediate connection to the vision, the passion and the openness of the people and the institution. Already at the time, it was obvious to me that CeMM would become a success story, and I wanted to be part of it.

3.    What is it about science that interests you the most?
The detective-like process of asking a question while simultaneously being able to look for the answer, and by doing so generating new and impactful knowledge.

4.    What is the best career advise you ever received, or you can give to the CeMM community?
Don't be afraid to venture outside your comfort zone and if you fail, don't let that bring you down. Just set your sails into another direction and have fun while doing it. If you are bored with sailing, you can always paraglide!

5.    Tell us what happened to you after you left CeMM?
After CeMM, I devoted myself to broaden the knowledge and experience I acquired from basic research and apply it to the understanding and control of human disease in different human populations. As such, I have moved to the UK where I have obtained an MSc in Control of Infectious Diseases at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). In parallel, I have worked as a research fellow at LSHTM, where I have combined population-based epidemiological study design with laboratory sciences to address questions of public health importance. I have been active in the field of diagnostics, guiding product development in academia, evaluating new technologies and investigating systems needs for diagnostics in global health emergencies. More recently, I have coordinated different population-based surveys to map the prevalence of malaria and other infectious diseases in the Bijagós archipelago of Guiné-Bissau in West Africa. In the meanwhile, I have also become a mother and I am currently waiting for my second child.

6.    What book do you have on your night table at the moment?
“Anxious People”, by Fredrik Backman

7.    What is the last song you heard?
“Dream a little dream of me”, by Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Amstrong. I listen to it every night before putting my son to sleep. It seems to hypnotize him into a deep sleep.

8.    Any message you would like to give to the CeMMies or a former colleague?
I miss you.



Adriana Goncalves is a Portuguese research fellow with a dual background in immunology and infectious diseases epidemiology. She carried out her PhD in the group of Giulio Superti-Furga and was one of the first CeMM PhD students. She continued her career at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), where she specialized in epidemiology and clinical research of infectious diseases. Adriana uses a combination of field epidemiology and microbiology techniques to address questions of public health importance, ranging from the elucidation of biological processes of infection to the identification of associated risk factors in different human populations. More recently she has been working on a network of integrated studies on Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) and malaria in Guinea Bissau.