Profile

She did her PhD at Oxford University in Nuclear Physics under the supervision of Professor David Brink. She is currently Full Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Coimbra, and has held various positions including Head of the Physics Department, President of the FCTUC Faculty Assembly, member of the General Council of the University of Coimbra and the Scientific Council of FCTUC, coordinator of the  Centre for Physics of the University of Coimbra, member of the Scientific Committee in Physics of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s New Talents program. The main objective of her research is to understand the properties of nuclear matter under extreme conditions of density, nuclear asymmetry and temperature, which is reflected in her published work on dense and hot stellar matter such as that which forms neutron stars and quark stars, the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics, the liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear matter, nuclear symmetry energy, the presence of exotic degrees of freedom in neutron stars and hadronic matter and magnetized quark matter. Some of her main works show how the microscopic properties of nuclear matter are reflected in macroscopic properties such as the radius of a neutron star.  She received the Gulbenkian Science Prize in 1991, has been an Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society since 2018 and is currently a corresponding member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. She has dedicated herself to the dissemination of experimental science among children, being the editor and author of the collection Ciência e Brincar by Editorial Bizâncio and the author of the section Vamos Experimentar! of the magazine Gazeta da Sociedade Portuguesa de Física.