Carolina Altaf, MSc

Carolina Altaf obtained her BSc degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Aveiro (2020) and completed her MSc in Microbiology programme at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon) in a partnership with the Evolutionary Biology (EB) group of the Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC), in Portugal. During her Bachelor’s she developed a platonic passion over commensal bacteria and how they promote human development, health and defence against pathogenic microorganisms. Through the first year of her Master’s and a Summer Internship at the IGC (Host-microorganism Interactions group), she got interested in the application of metagenomics and of probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics in the context of the vaginal and gut microbiota. To that end, her Master’s project at the IGC consisted of understanding if specific mice-commensal Lactobacilli strains increase the cost of resistance on antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli strains, for it has been previously shown by the EB group that the gut microbiota has an impact the fitness of resistant bacteria.