Ashley Novais is a Research Fellow in the Micro and Nanofabrication Department (Microfabrication and Exploratory Nanotechnology research group) at INL. She focuses her research on improving implantable microelectrodes and sensors for the monitoring of neurologic activity.

Ashley has a PhD in Health Sciences in the field of Neuroscience from the School of Medicine from Minho University where she focused in behavior, morphologic and neurochemical read-outs from rodent models, later she joined a collaborative international project with NeuroSpin (Saclay, France), INSERN (Paris, France) and ICVS (Braga, Portugal) where she studied the heterogeneity of the psychiatric vulnerability to chronic stress, using behavior, biochemical and functional MRI scores. She also has a Master’s in Molecular Genetics and a Degree in Applied Biology all from Minho University.

• Magalhães R, Barrière DA, Novais A, Marques F, Marques P, Cerqueira JJ, Sousa JC, Cachia A, Boumezbeur F, Bottlaender M, Mériaux S, Jay TM and Sousa N.
  The dynamics of stress: a longitudinal MRI study of brain structure and connectome.
  Molecular Psychiatry (2017) Impact factor: 13,314.

• Ferreira AC, Santos T, Sampaio-Marques B, Novais A, Mesquita SD, Ludovico P, Bernardino L, Correia-Neves M, Sousa N, Palha JA, Sousa JC and Marques F.
  Lipocalin-2 regulates adult neurogenesis and contextual discriminative behaviours.
  Molecular Psychiatry. (2017) doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.95. Impact factor: 13,314.

• Luis R. Jacinto, Rui Mata, Ashley Novais, Fernanda Marques and Nuno Sousa.
  The habenula as a critical node in chronic stress-related anxiety.
  Experimental Neurology (2016) doi: 10.1016/j.expneurol.2016.12.003. Impact factor: 4,706.

• Novais A, Monteiro S, Roque S, Correia-Neves M and Sousa N.
  How age, sex and genotype shape the stress response.
  Neurobiology of stress (2016). doi: 10.1016/j.ynstr.2016.11.004

• Novais A, Ferreira AC, Marques F, Pêgo JM, Cerqueira JJ, David-Pereira A, Campos FL, Dalla C, Kokras N, Sousa N, Palha JA, Sousa JC.
  Neudesin is involved in anxiety behavior: structural and neurochemical correlates.
  Front. Behav. Neurosc. (2013) 7:119. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00119. Impact factor: 3,104