Our teams

Baltazar Cá, MSc, PhD
Instituto Nacional de Saúde Pública (INASA) /Bandim health project
Principal Investigator

Baltazar Cá has a Masters degree in tropical health at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine-New University of Lisbon in 2014. Baltazar was selected to be part of the PhD Program «Science for Development», an innovative advanced training program led by Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and funded by FCT. In 2015, Baltazar Cá joined Margarida Saraiva’s Lab at the institute for research and innovation in health sciences (i3s), University of Porto, to start his PhD work on tuberculosis. After 4 years of research on the impact of bacterial diversity on the host immune response with focus on Mycobacterium africanum, Baltazar Cá obtained a PhD in molecular and cell biology at the University of Porto.

Christian Wejse MD, PhD, Assoc.Prof.
Supervisor Collaborator

Christian Wejse is a specialist in infectious diseases at the Department of Infectious Diseases Q, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark. He is an MD since 1999 and spent in 2003-5 two years in Guinea Bissau in West Africa as part of his PhD project at the University of Aarhus. He defended his PhD degree in 2007 on tuberculosis in Guinea Bissau and has built up his own research group focusing on tuberculosis and HIV in low-income countries. Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor at School of Public Health, Aarhus University where he has founded GloHAU, Center for Global Health, Aarhus University. His research includes randomized clinical trials, epidemiology, testing of diagnostic assays and qualitative research. The purpose is to provide knowledge about infections and their influence on mortality in high-risk areas in order to be able to implement effective interventions. He has collected a productive group of young researchers around him, and actively participates in organizational work on HIV and TB at national and international level. He is member of the scientific advisory board for the Bandim Health Project in Guinea Bissau, chairman of the Scientific Coordinating Committee of the Bissau HIV cohort, leader of PoRT, the INDEPTH Network working group on TB, and a part of Global Health Minders thinktank. He is reviewer for a number of scientific journals, foundations and dissertations. He has published widely with a steep upward curve publication and an H-index of 24 (Scopus). He is the founder of the Bissau HIV cohort which follows +10000 HIV infected patients in the capital of Guinea Bissau and leads several projects on risk factors, adherence, loss to follow-up, co-infection and treatment trials within this cohort.

Margarida Saraiva, PhD.
Collaborator

Margarida Saraiva obtained a degree in Biochemistry (Hons) in 1997, by Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal. After 4 years (1999-2002) of research on Poxvirus Immune Evasion, in Antonio Alcami’s lab, Margarida Saraiva obtained a PhD in Pathology awarded by the University of Cambridge, UK, and moved to Anne O’Garra’s lab, at the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research (London). During her post-doc, Margarida Saraiva investigated the molecular mechanisms that regulate the expression of Interleukin-10 by immune cells. In 2007, Margarida Saraiva returned to Portugal and joined the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS) at Universidade do Minho, as a Ciência 2007 fellow, to study several cellular and molecular mechanisms in place during the innate immune response to mycobacteria. From June 2015, Margarida Saraiva became a group leader at IBMC-Porto to study the molecular mechanisms underlying immune regulation using deregulated myelopoiesis and tuberculosis as disease models. Margarida Saraiva has published 54 articles in journals, gathering a total of 3260 citations. H-index=21 (scopus); successfully supervised several MSc, PhD and Post-doctoral fellows; has been PI in several competitive funded grants; has been invited speaker in various international conferences and institutes; and has been awarded several national and international prizes for her research. Margarida Saraiva currently serves as President of the Portuguese Society for Immunology.

Crister José Ocadaque MD, PhD
Clinical trial Coordinator

Crister is an Infectologist and holds a master’s and doctorate in medical microbiology from the Federal University of Ceará (Brazil). Crister’s main focus is on respiratory illness, antimicrobial resistance, and alternative methods to study biofilms. Crister used to teach at Jeanpeajet (Guinea-Bissau) in three different curricular areas: Infectious diseases, medical microbiology, and basic immunology. Crister is currently an Assistant Professor at the University Uninassau-Ce Brazil. Crister is very interested in student engagement techniques and has experience in Infectious diseases. He’s also a medical researcher, applied to understanding the seasonal of respiratory viruses and their correlation with patients' illnesses. Currently, Crister collaborates in several research projects of excellence including the Maf-TBprogress project and Burkit linfoma associated with malaria.