Our Team

I am a Geoarchaeologist interested in unravelling past human behavior from its sedimentary signatures. Identifying where our species first evolved and how specific traits of our current behaviour emerged has become among my major research foci. Currently, I am a principal researcher and group leader at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behaviour (ICArEHB), at the University of Algarve in Portugal. Prior to my arrival in Faro, I completed my PhD research in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA), and was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).

My main research interest is the study of ancient human-animal interactions through the analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites. I was initially trained as a zooarchaeologist, but from my PhD on, I have specialized in Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) and palaeoproteomics. I received a BA in Archaeology (2016) and an RMSc in Bioarchaeology (2018) from Leiden University. In 2023, I received my doctoral degree as part of a joint PhD program between the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena. For my PhD, I used ZooMS to gain insight into Australian faunal assemblages by improving identification rates of fragmented bone.

I joined the ERC-MATRIX project in October 2024, and in my research I will be targeting micro-contextualized bone fragments for palaeoproteomics analysis, focusing on extracting ancient proteins from micromorphological resin-impregnated sediments.

I have an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Santiago de Compostela and pursued the Inter-University Master’s Degree in Quaternary Archaeology and Human Evolution at the University of Rovira i Virgili asociated to IPHES. At IPHES, I later worked in the Geoarchaeological laboratory where I was trained as a micromorphology technician and as a geoarchaeologist. During the fall of 2022, I joined the Matrix team at ICArEHB – Universidade do Algarve.
I am interested in understanding the population turnover that occurred during the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic through the application of geoarchaeological techniques. My PhD project focuses on archaeological sites in the NE of the Iberian Peninsula, namely the study of site formation histories and paleoclimatic reconstructions at the sites of La Griera, Cova Foradada, and Cova Gran.

I am an archaeologist graduated from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), where I also completed my MA with a focus on Classical Archaeology. I continued my MA studies in the School of Chemistry at the same institution and collaborated with the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology “NCSR Demokritos” in the fields of archaeometry and archaeoinformatics. My interests concern understanding the interactions between humans and their environments in the past by combining geoarchaeological and computational approaches.

I am a biochemist, graduated from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Having mainly worked in bioenergetics and metabolism research for most of my life, I started a new chapter in late 2022 embarking in a new scientific field as a lab technician within the MATRIX ERC research team. I have been tasked with setting up the new clean lab and as a part of my responsibilities I will be implementing and creating lab experimental protocols and managing lab logistics.