Sara Costa Silva graduated in Pathological, Cytological and Thanatological Anatomy at the School of Health Sciences of Porto. She then joined IPATIMUP Diagnostics as a research technician of the Genetics and Molecular Pathology Lab. Simultaneously, she enrolled in the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Applied to Health master programme at the School of Health Sciences of Porto. Her master thesis was developed at the Neuroengineering and Computational Neuroscience (NCN) group of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health of the University of Porto (UP), where she aimed at understanding the calcium signaling in astrocytes. In 2021, she enrolled in the International Doctoral Programme in Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology Applied to Health Sciences of the Abel Salazar Institute for the Biomedical Sciences of the UP, and was granted a FCT doctoral grant to study the astrocyte-neuron communication under the supervision of Professor Doctor Paulo Aguiar and Doctor Miguel Aroso.