Pharmacist and PhD in Biological Chemistry from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Andrea Paula-Lima developed her post-doctorate at the University of Chile, where she is currently Associate Professor of the Faculty of Dentistry and Faculty of Medicine. For her professional contribution to the study of Alzheimer's disease (AD), she won the Junior Faculty Award from the AAT-ADPD in 2011 (Barcelona, Spain) and in 2013 (Florence, Italy). She received distinctions from important scientific societies such as the Society for Neurosciences (USA), the National Academy of Sciences of Chile and Brazil, the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, Foundation Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, and the Royal Society. Using experimental models ranging from the in vitro to the study in patients, she is interested in elucidating and blocking the intraneuronal signaling pathways activated by beta-amyloid peptide oligomers, emphasizing those pathways dependent on calcium ion as the second messenger. She is also searching for functional alterations detectable by fEEG in patients to contribute to the early diagnosis of AD.

I received my Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the P. Universidad Católica de Chile, studying the enzymology and genomics of lignin degradation by white rot fungi with Dr. Rafael Vicuña. Then, as a PEW Latin American Fellow, I went to the lab of Jay C. Dunlap (Dartmouth Medical School), where as a postdoc I became interested in fungal functional genomics, photobiology, and circadian regulation, developing different tools such as a high-throughput platform for in vivo circadian studies in Neurospora crassa. In 2009, I joined the P. Universidad Católica de Chile, where currently I am Full Professor and since 2018 the director of the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology (iBio) (previously Millennium Nucleus for Fungal Integrative and Synthetic Biology, 2014-2017) and a HHMI International Research Scholar. Work conducted in my lab, has contributed to advance the understanding of circadian timing, the role of clock-regulation on plant-pathogen interactions, general transcriptional mechanisms, and the effect of light on fungal transcriptional programs, and synthetic transcriptional circuits as well.