Tiago Gil Oliveira is Associate Professor at the School of Medicine, at University of Minho, research line coordinator at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), neuroradiologist at Hospital de Braga and President of the Portuguese Society for Neuroscience. He was a student in the joint Minho MD/PhD program with Columbia University, NYC, USA. He carried out his PhD studies at Columbia University, between 2007 and 2010, and MD studies at University of Minho. While studying the role of lipid signaling in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis, he showed that the ablation of the lipid-modulating enzyme, phospholipase D2, was protective in different Alzheimer’s disease models. He then expanded his research interests to the study of mood disorders and brain plasticity mechanisms. In parallel with his academic work, he continued his medical career. He is now using lipidomic approaches together with brain imaging to study neurodegenerative disorders. He is also a site researcher involved in various clinical trials focused on neurodegenerative disorders and he has a particular interest in the mechanisms underlying amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA).

Cláudia Guimas Almeida, PhD, is a Principal Investigator at NOVA Medical School (Lisbon), where she leads the Neuroscience of Aging and Alzheimer lab. Her research focuses on identifying early cellular mechanisms underlying synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to inform the development of synaptic biomarkers and novel therapeutic strategies. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Lisbon, with doctoral training in Gunnar Gouras’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College (New York), where she demonstrated that intraneuronal beta-amyloid disrupts synaptic and endosomal pathways before neurodegeneration. She later trained in membrane trafficking and quantitative cell biology at Institut Curie (Paris) as an EMBO and Marie Curie fellow. Her laboratory integrates mouse-primary neurons, human iPSC-derived neurons, advanced single-cell imaging, and molecular analyses to understand how AD genetic risk factors—particularly BIN1 and CD2AP—alter endocytic and lysosomal pathways. By mapping early, targetable mechanisms of synaptic vulnerability, her work aims to contribute to precision approaches for early diagnosis and disease modification in Alzheimer’s disease.