Sofia Coimbra

I’m a PhD student at the University of Porto, developing my research project at CIBIO-InBIO. I developed my MSc thesis in the AGRIGENOMICS group supervised by Albano Beja-Pereira and Lucía Pérez-Pardal, in 2021/2022, focused on the characterization of the tongue dorsum microbiome in wine tasters. This work got me interested in the evolution and interaction of microbiological ecosystems and the evolutionary processes behind it, so I spent the last year (2022/2023) as an assistant researcher in a soil microbiome biodiversity project working with non-invasive samples, NGS techniques and genomic data analysis. 

My phD work will focus on assessing the diverse microbial communities found in intensive Portuguese dairy farms using metagenomics. The study of the dairy farm environmental microbiomes is vital to understand how they interact with the animal microbiomes and how the monitoring of the environmental microbiomes can work as biosecurity sentinels.