Paula López Pérez is the Career Development Unit Coordinator at Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde – i3S (Universidade do Porto). The i3S Career Development Unit (CDU) was created in October 2019 to promote researchers’ personal and professional growth and to empower staff to manage their career development by making effective career choices and transitions.

Paula has an original background in Chemistry from University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain); a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Minho (Portugal) and 7 years of postdoctoral experience with her core fields of research spanning from biomaterials development and tissue engineering to fundamental molecular biology and anti-microbial peptides. Since she started the PhD, she worked in five academic labs and one company across five different countries, experiencing very different working practices and mingled with people of extremely diverse cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This experience together with her natural drive of building and nurturing human relationships at the work place and beyond woke up her interest in personal and professional development and she used a career break as a full-time mum to prepare her career transition. Now she enjoys helping researchers to make conscious decisions about their future and to reach their full potential!