Professor/researcher

I am an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil. I currently direct a research lab with 15 full- and partial-time employees (research associates, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students). My research focuses on computational drug discovery, cheminformatics, computational toxicology, structural bioinformatics, with the emphasis on drug design for Neglected Tropical Diseases and Cancer, as well as the development of predictive tools to study pharmacokinetics and toxicity properties of chemical compounds, as alternative methods for animal testing. In 2014, I was awarded with the For Women in Science award from L’Oréal-UNESCO and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in Brazil, and in 2015 with the International Rising Talents award from L’Oréal – UNESCO in France. In 2022 I received the Brazilian Women in Chemistry award from American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Brazilian Society of Chemistry (SBQ). I was elected to the Young Academy of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (2016-2021), and to the Global Young Academy (GYA, 2020-2023). I served as Associate Editor for the Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences (Elsevier) and as Associate Editor of Communications in Chemistry (Nature). Currently, I am Associate Editor of ACS Omega (American Chemical Society). I am Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (ACS), Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (ACS) and ChemMedChem (Wiley). As can be gleaned from my list of publications, my research has had a major impact in the area of computational drug discovery where we employ cheminformatics approaches such as QSAR modeling and virtual screening to discover novel bioactive compounds. In recent years, we have expanded our research interest towards computational toxicology. Importantly, we have ported our major software tools and models publicly available in our LabMol portal (www.labmol.com.br).