Contact Information

nery@saturn.med.nyu.edu


Biography

I graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Porto, Portugal in 1996. After short training periods doing research in Stockholm and Paris I joined the lab to do my PhD in October of 1998 with a fellowship from the Gubenkian PhD program in Biology and Medicine.

During my PhD I was interested in several aspects of brain development. In my first project I studied the role of Shh in the specification of oligodendrocytes in the brain using loss and gain-of function approaches. I showed that similarly to the spinal cord Shh is able to induce the development of oligodendrocytes within the telencephalon.

In my last projects I was using cell transplantations in utero to fate map different proliferative regions of the embryonic brain and follow them into adulthood. With Hynek Wichterle (former student in Arturo Alvarez-Buylla lab) and Dan Turnbull, I was involved in the in vivo fate mapping of the MGE and LGE. With Josh Corbin in the lab I found that the CGE is a progenitor region distinct from both the MGE and LGE and that CGE cells have a unique in vivo pattern of migration, contributing cells several dorsal and ventral structures in the adult brain. These results provide the first insights into the development and fate of the CGE.

I was also involved in other projects including looking at the role of Notch signaling in maintaining stem cell populations in the brain throughout embryogenesis using a loss-of-function approach.

I am very interested in understanding how embryonic development translates into adult function, specifically how interneurons, that undergo tangential migration, get assembled in cortical circuits. Therefore, since June of 2002 I am doing a Postdoc in the lab to characterize the different cortical interneuronal populations that originate in the MGE and the CGE in terms of their electrophisiological properties. To do this we are collaborating with Steve Noctor in Arnold Kriegstein's lab.


Weblinks

http://www.igc.gulbenkian.pt/