Sofia Benfeito

Bio

Sofia Benfeito (SB) graduated in Chemistry in 2010 at Faculty of Sciences of University of Porto (FCUP) and received her M.Sc. in Chemistry in 2012 in the same institution. In July 2018, she completed her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Toxicology specialty, at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Porto, which was titled as European Doctorate. The work developed during the PhD was considered a major breakthrough and was internationally awarded by Paul Ehrlich European MedChem Network-PhD Label (Italy, 2019). Currently, as Junior Researcher (2023.06106.CEECIND), she is engaged in the synthesis of new chemical entities capable of preventing oxytosis/ferroptosis and mitochondrial dysfunction in Friedreich's ataxia.

SB is the Principal Investigator of an Awarded FCT Project, "DeFend - De-ironing Friedreich's Ataxia with innovative mitochondria-targeted chelators" (2022.04633.PTDC, 50K€), project with collaboration of Salk Institute, USA. SB participated as a Researcher in other numerous funded R&D projects, from which resulted 38 peer-reviewed publications in international high impact factor journals (10 as first author, 2 as corresponding author, 86% in Q1), 7 book chapters, 97 communications in Poster, 50 Oral communications, as well as 38 abstracts in conference proceedings. The citation count from Scopus is a total of 622 resulting in an h-index of 14. Moreover, she was also co-inventor of 1 international patent (PCT/IB2017/056412; US20190248816).