Prof. Susana Rocha
Susana Rocha was born in Torres Novas, Portugal, in 1983.
In 2005 she obtained her MSc in Chemistry at the Instituto Superior Técnico (part of the Technical University of Lisbon, PT). During the last year, she performed an internship at the group of Prof. Johan Hofkens at KU Leuven (BE), where she then started a PhD. While focused in the investigation of enzymatic reactions at the single molecule level, she was involved in the development of single molecule based super-resolution microscopy. After her PhD, she worked on the application of cutting-edge fluorescence microscopy methods to address biological questions. From 2015 to 2019 she held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). In 2017 she performed a research stay at the group of Prof. Paul Kouwer, at Radboud University (Nijmegen, NL), where she started working with synthetic polymers for biomedical applications. In 2019 she visited the group of Dr. Rodrigo Barderas (Insituto Salud D. Carlos III, Madrid, SP), where she acquired knowledge on cancer metastasis models and gene editing technologies.
From 2019 on, she is a tenure-track research professor at the Chemistry Department, KU Leuven. There, she heads the Biomaterials and Nanotechnology Lab, developing imaging solutions for imaging 3D cell models and developing nano-sized particles for gene/drug delivery.
