Pets as Sentinels, Forecasters and Promoters of Human Health

Dr. M. Ramiro Pastorinho was born in Braga, northern Portugal, in 1970. He graduated in Biology from Coimbra University, Portugal in 1997. After several years teaching at high school, he started research conducive to his Doctorate thesis on the latitudinal calibration of standardized marine bioassays, which created the opportunity of working, besides Aveiro University, at the University of Iceland and the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, UK. His passion for bioassays granted him a post-Doctoral fellowship which took him to the radically different setting of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, USA and the Colorado School of Mines where he became a Research Scholar, with periods spent at Ehime University, Japan as an International Invited Researcher. Working in a mining-focused setting steered him towards human health and an invitation to become an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Beira Interior, Portugal. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Évora, in the (sunny) South of Portugal.

 Dr. Ana Catarina Sousa was born in Covilhã, Central Portugal, in 1976. She obtained her PhD in Biology in September 2009 from the University of Aveiro in collaboration with Ehime University in Japan. Upon finishing her PhD, she moved to the USA to work as Research Assistant in the Colorado School of Mines, moving back to Portugal in 2010 to start her first postdoc on Human Exposure Pathways to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. Her second postdoc was developed at CICECO, University of Aveiro and focused on the use of ionic liquids in the context of environmental health. Between 2017 and 2018 she was a researcher at Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique – CNRS, in France. Before starting her current position as researcher at CICECO, University of Aveiro she was a lecturer of Environmental Toxicology at Hokkaido University, Japan. Ana Sousa’s main research interests and experience include the evaluation of exposure levels and pathways to environmental contaminants, particularly endocrine disrupting chemicals in wildlife, domestic animals and humans.