Mafalda Neto joined INL in June 2021 as a Junior Research Fellow for the Food Processing and Nutrition Group in the Life Sciences Department. Her research focuses on developing cell-based models to evaluate the safety and efficiency of orally administered compounds and predict in vitro intestinal responses.

Mafalda holds a BSc degree (2016) in Biochemistry from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and an MSc degree (2019) in Biotechnology (field of Molecular Biotechnology) from the University of Aveiro (Portugal). During her MSc, she joined the COMPASS Research Group and gained experience working with biomaterials towards different cell/tissue engineering approaches. Her MSc thesis, in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Institute of Biomaterials (Germany), focused on exploring chemically-modified surfaces patterned with wettability-contrasting micro-regions to produce polymer-based nanosheets.