Claudia Mendes

My eagerness to understand the wonder of living things paved my journey to a successful career in the Life Sciences, spanning over a decade and two countries. During this time, I was mainly interested in understanding the mechanistic basis of phenotypic diversity, in particular those generating variation in size and shape of animal bodies and organs, and how these traits evolve.

I earned my PhD in Developmental Biology in 2015 under the supervision of Dr Christen Mirth and Dr Élio Sucena at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Portugal. I later moved to the UK to conduct my first postdoctoral research project with Professor Alistair McGregor and Dr Daniela Nunes in Oxford Brookes University, and then my second and final postdoctoral research project with Professor Clive Wilson at the University of Oxford.

I am now a Project Manager in the Cragg Group funded by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) Initiative and the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF). I am the main point of contact between the global ASAP network and our multidisciplinary team composed of leading experts in the study of basal ganglia, neuromodulation, dopamine function, and Parkinson’s disease pathophysiology at the University of Oxford (UK), Boston University (USA), the Karolinksa Institute (Sweden), Peking University (China) and Stanford University (USA).