Filipa Barroso Pereira, Ph.D.

Filipa Pereira earned her Ph.D. in biological sciences at the University of Minho, Portugal, where her research revolved around advancing methods to expedite strain engineering, with a focus on the metabolic engineering of pentose metabolism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This enthusiasm for improving microbial metabolic networks spurred her interest in the potential of predictive tools, leading Pereira to a postdoctoral position in at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany. Her work integrated theoretical adaptive laboratory evolution, systems and synthetic biology approaches to metabolic engineering of yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

In 2021, Pereira transitioned to working with David Sherman, Ph.D., at the Life Sciences Institute to apply her systems metabolic engineering skills to non-model organisms for the production of low-yielding natural products. Pereira’s lab in the LSI expands its work to understand the impact of gene expression regulation on secondary metabolism and microbial diversity.