Sofia Santos Costa is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (IHMT/UNL), since September 2014.

She is a member of the Global Health and Tropical Medicine (GHTM) research center. She has a degree in Applied Chemistry, specialization Biotechnology from Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (2005); a MSc in Medical Microbiology from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (2008) and a PhD in Biomedical Sciencies, specialization Microbiology from IHMT/UNL (2013).

In 2014, she received the Award Professor Doutor Manuel Pinto for the best PhD Thesis of 2013 in Biomedical Sciences, specialization Microbiology and the Excellence Award Garcia de Orta for the best student of 2013 of the IHMT/UNL. She is currently developing her studies at the Unit of Medical Microbiology, where she holds a Post-doctoral Grant funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) to develop the working program “Exploring routes of animal-to-human staphylococci transmission: trying to break the cycle of virulence and antimicrobial resistance dissemination”.

She has participated in Research projects in the areas of Antimicrobial Resistance in Bacteria and as a lecturer in the course of “Antibiotic Resistance Mechanisms” of the Master programs in Medical Microbiology (UNL) and Biomedical Sciences (IHMT/UNL).

Her main areas of interest are efflux-mediated resistance to antibiotics and biocides in Staphylococcus aureus and other staphylococci; epidemiology of resistance genes in staphylococci of human and animal origin; mobile genetic elements as vehicles of dissemination of resistance and virulence traits in staphylococci; mechanisms of action of biocides; biofilm formation; identification and evaluation of compounds with efflux inhibitory activity in bacteria (staphylococci and mycobacteria).

Sofia Santos Costa is author/co-author of 22 international peer-reviewed publications and is/was co-supervisor of four MSc students and one ERASMUS student.