Isabel Rocha

isabel

Isabel Rocha is Vice-Rector at NOVA University Lisbon, coordinating the areas of research, innovation and value creation.

She is a Principal Researcher at ITQB NOVA, coordinating the Synthetic Biology Research Laboratory. She has a PhD from the University of Minho in Chemical and Biological Engineering and did post-doctoral work at the Technical University of Denmark. She carries out research in Biotechnology, covering the topics of Bioinformatics, Metabolic Engineering, Synthetic Biology and Systems Biology, and has published more than 140 full papers in journals, books and international conferences. She is the scientific coordinator, among others, of the Shikifactory100 Project (Shikifactory100.eu) and the national representative on the executive board of the European Bioinformatics Infrastructure (ELIXIR). She is also an evaluator for various funding agencies, including the European Commission.

During 2007, she was a visiting professor at MIT, USA, as part of the MIT-Portugal Programme and was, from 2007 to 2017, part of the MIT-Portugal faculty, responsible for an innovation education programme involving 4 universities and 2 PhD programmes – the i-teams programme. She was President of P-Bio, the Portuguese Bioindustries Association, and was one of the founders of the companies Biotempo and SilicoLife.

She is Chair of the Board of Directors of the InnovPlantProtect CoLab, in crop protection, and Vice-Chair of the BIOREF CoLab in Biorefineries, and is also a member of the Board of Directors of Madan Parque, NOVA’s technology-based incubator.