9—10 January 2020 // Funny Animals
Daniela Pinto holds a doctoral degree in microbiology from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. With the support of a Marie Curie IEF, in 2014 she joined the Ludwig- Maximilians University Munich (Germany) where she designed synthetic genetic circuits using transcription factors. In 2016 she joined the Technical University Dresden (Germany), where she is now a postdoctoral researcher. In the summer of 2018, she spent 3 months at the University of Copenhagen, where she studied the evolution of alternative σ factors under the support of an EMBO short-term fellowship. Her current research interests span several aspects of alternative σ factor biology: their diversity, activation mechanisms, evolution and synthetic biology applications. She is now planning to study the evolution of signal transduction systems and their role in the evolution of cognitive behavior in bacteria. Over the last 8 years, Daniela has published 14 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and is the first author in 10 of them. She is since 2018, a member of the basal cognition group, a group of international scientists that aims at tracing the biological mechanisms necessary for cognition, from bacteria to higher animals.