Diana Prata

Diana Prata is a Marie Curie Fellow and Group Leader at the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering of the University of Lisbon (after 12 years in King's College London, KCL, UK) where she has set up the Biomedical Neuroscience research lab. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at KCL, and an Associate Member at ISCTE. In 2017, she won a Marie Curie Actions 3rd Prize as the most promising scientist in 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship'.

She became a biologist in the University of Lisbon in 2002, but always felt divided between the cell and the psyche. Thus she moved to the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, of King’s College London, as a Leonardo da Vinci fellow, where she started putting her hands, literally, on the genetics of mental illness. Awarded an FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal) fellowship, she moved closer to the brain and completed therein a PhD in neuroimaging genetics in 2008. She then coordinated a joint-venture between KCL and a pharmacogenetics company, Optimal Medicine, Ltd. Later, she was awarded the prestigious NIHR (National Institute for Health Research, UK) post-doc fellowship to work on a multimodal biomarker of psychosis, and became a Lecturer at KCL. She was then distinguished by King’s College London as a top early career researcher in the UK Research Excellence Framework assessment 2014. After 12 years in the UK, she founded her own research lab at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM Lisboa) which is now the Biomedical Neuroscience Lab at the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Since 2018, she is also an invited associate member of the Centre for Psychological Research and Social Intervention of IUL-ISCTE.