Mariana Luz
Mariana Luz is a cell and molecular biologist with a keen interest in bioinformatics and computational biology. She has a BSc degree in Cell and Molecular Biology (FCT NOVA, 2020) and a MSc degree in Molecular Genetics and Biomedicine (FCT NOVA, 2022). Her master thesis focused on assessing the prevalence of transcription readthrough in healthy human tissues.
After her masters, she received two research fellowships: one where she focused on studying X chromosome inactivation in systemic lupus erythematosus patients; another where she focused on detecting possible cancer biomarkers for cancer-associated fibroblasts.
In 2024, she was awarded with a PhD grant from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and is now studying imprint defects in induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with the goal of improving their reliability and safety for broader biomedical use.