Investigador
Investigador Principal
Principal Investigator
Helena Soares leads a multidisciplinary team integrating medical doctors and biomedical researchers. She obtained a Pharmacy degree from the University of Coimbra (2001), completed a PhD in Immune Physiology at The Rockefeller University (2006) with a Gulbenkian Fellowship, and undertook postdoctoral training at the Institut Pasteur supported by a Long-Term EMBO Fellowship.
In 2014, she returned to Portugal through the highly competitive FCT Investigator Programme and established her independent laboratory at NMS in 2015. She currently serves as Executive Board Member and Thematic Line Coordinator of the iNOVA4Health Research Unit (2025–2029), which secured €9.5M in institutional funding. She has obtained competitive funding from FCT, ESCMID, Gilead, and Pfizer, and as team member in Horizon Europe programmes (EVCA and MPS Twinnings).
Her research focuses on how tissue microenvironments regulate human immune responses and how biological and environmental variables, sex, age, temperature, and pollutants, shape immunity in health and disease. Her programme bridges fundamental and clinical research through collaborations with 10 hospitals. She maintains strong industry partnerships (Pfizer, Gilead, Medinfar, Janssen, Sanofi), including consultancy for Merck Sharp & Dohme on vaccine literacy.
She coordinates postgraduate education in vaccine hesitancy and sex-differential health, teaches immunology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, delivers invited international lectures, and is active in science communication (>30 media contributions). She currently sits on the Fiscal Board of the Portuguese Society for Immunology.
Internationally, she provides scientific leadership as co-coordinator of the EFIS Study Group on Immune Sex Differences and expert collaborator of the European Commission JRC CIAO project.