Professor
Professor Auxiliar com Agregação
Principal Investigator
Otília Vieira completed her PhD on atherosclerosis prevention under the supervision of Prof. Robert Salvayre (Univ. Paul Sabatier, France) and Prof. Leonor Almeida (Univ. of Coimbra, Portugal). She then pursued postdoctoral training abroad, first investigating host-pathogen interactions with Prof. Sergio Grinstein at the University of Toronto, Canada, and subsequently studying Trans-Golgi Network sorting in polarized cells with Prof. Kai Simons at the Max Planck Institute, Dresden, Germany.
In 2006, she returned to Portugal to establish an independent research group at the Center for Neurosciences and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, where her work focused on lysosome-mediated plasma membrane resealing, Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, and the development of surfactants as topical microbicides. In 2014, she was awarded the FCT Investigator grant (Consolidator level) and joined NOVA Medical School, Lisbon. She is currently an Assistant Professor, Principal Investigator of the “Lysosomes and Disease” group, and holds a Habilitation degree. Her research aims to unravel the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis and translate these insights into predictive tools and novel therapies for cardiovascular diseases, leading a multidisciplinary team of cardiologists, cell biologists, and biophysical chemists.
She has authored 51 peer-reviewed articles, including first, last, and corresponding author publications in journals such as PNAS, Nature Cell Biology, and Journal of Cell Biology. Her work has been cited over 6,000 times (h-index 32), placing her among the World’s Top 2% of highly cited researchers. She has supervised nine postdocs, nine PhD students, and three MSc students, secured over €2 million in competitive funding, coordinates international collaborations, and serves as Editor for Scientific Reports and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. She also holds a provisional international patent.