MD, PhD
Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Santo António (CHUdSA)
Hospital Santo António (HSA)
Research group
Clinical and Experimental Human Genomics
Celia Azevedo Soares is a clinical geneticist who sees patients with multiple hereditary disorders and collaborates with projects related to Human Genetics and Neurodevelopment. She performed her PhD thesis in the development of the earliest projections from the eye to the brain, and retinal neurogenesis, at the Mason Lab, Columbia University, as a visiting MD/PhD student from Minho University. For her PhD, she was awarded an individual PhD fellowship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. Besides, she is trained in methods of clinical research after completing a 2-year non-degree program from Harvard Medical School – Portugal. After her MD-PhD, she started a residency in Medical Genetics that included observerships at international centers. Celia was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Genetic Medicine, Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, USA, where she received training in Clinical Genetics from Dr. Joann Bodurtha and in whole-exome analysis from Dr. Nara Sobreira. She also trained in human brain embryology and fetal pathology at the Necker Hospital, Paris, France, under the supervision of Dr. Tania Attie-Bitach. Besides her scientific interests, she has been involved in outreach activities related to neuroscience and supervised a student in a program directed to racial minorities. She collaborated with sociologic projects to discuss inequalities and wrote about it at a national public newspaper. She is also involved in the community of physicians championing the creation of a physician-scientist career in Portugal, publishing two opinion papers on this topic as the first and the last author. She is an active member of the European Society of Human Genetics as an elected member of the Young Board and member of the Education Committee. She organized workshops and sessions at this organization’s annual meeting. She is also a coordinator of the Young Geneticist Network, an international group that has been engaged in activities to facilitate access to training by young human geneticists. She has actively contributed to the writing of lab research grants with her knowledge of Neurodevelopment and Human Genetics.