Oradores e Moderadores

Alexandra OliveiraPediatra do Neurodesenvolvimento

Alexandra Oliveira

Centro de Desenvolvimento da Criança, Hospital Pediátrico Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra

Astrid VicenteInvestigadora

Astrid M. Vicente

Astrid M. Vicente is a senior researcher in biomedical sciences and public health, and Head of the Department of Health Promotion and Non-Communicable Disease Prevention at the National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge, in Lisbon, Portugal. Her research aims to understand the etiology and pathophysiological mechanisms underlying complex and highly prevalent non-communicable diseases, with a multidimensional perspective of non-communicable diseases, including biomedical but also epidemiological and social issues. Current research projects focus on the integration of multiple levels of information - biological, clinical, socio-demographic and environmental – using systems medicine methodologies to define models with predictive value for improved diagnosis, prognosis and drug therapy in clinical settings. This approach is expected to provide a broad perspective of gene-environment interactions in health and disease, and ultimately allow the progression towards translation of knowledge into personalised medicine tools for health promotion, disease prevention and better therapeutic strategies in public health and clinical settings. To develop these lines of research, she is involved with large research consortia and networks, established to foster the collaboration between experts from different fields and conduct large scale population analysis. Astrid M Vicente has contributed to the scientific literature in her research area, particularly in autism, other neuropsychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, cerebrovascular diseases (stroke) and autoimmune diseases (Systemic Lupus Erythematosus). She is an Invited Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, regularly organizing and teaching graduate courses and workshops. She has served as elected President of the Portuguese Society for Human Genetics and received several national awards for her scientific contributions. She was recently appointed representative of the Portuguese Health Ministry for the International Consortium for Personalized Medicine (ICPerMed), of which she is currently elected Vice-chair, and the 1+M Genomes initiative, where she is part of the governance working group.