Ana Carina Manjua fell in love with biomedical research during her master's at the New University of Lisbon, when studying electroconductive materials as biobatteries for pacemakers. During her PhD at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the same city, she worked on building a microchip to regenerate blood vessels. After that, she worked 1.5 years in a biomaterials company. Manjua returned to research last March as a EuroTech postdoc at the TU/e Biosensors and Devices Lab. She will again work on microchips, this time in the context of cardiovascular diseases. The goal is to remodel cardiac tissue on a chip and recreate its micro-environment in order to simulate the disease and find ways to regenerate the tissue. Manjua’s research will include the microchip design, developing a hydrogel for electromagnetic stimulation to regenerate cells, building a stretchable platform – at the Swiss University EPFL – to simulate cardiac rhythm, and arranging a computational interface, before she can actually study the cardiac tissue.
