Isabel Amaral graduated in Marine Biology at the Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar in 1987. After working in the field of marine aquaculture as a biologist she undertook a PhD at INEB (Doctoral program in Biomedical Engineering), obtaining the PhD degree in Engineering Sciences with the thesis entitled Chitosan Matrices for Cell-based Bone Regenerative Therapies on February 2006. On March 2006 she joined the research team of INEB Biomaterials for Neurosciences to develop her Pos-Doc project entitled Pre-vascularization of 3-D porous scaffolds as a novel spinal cord injury therapeutic regenerative strategy to enhance adhesion and differentiation of human neural stem cells from embryonic origin, at INEB and at the Institute of Pathology of Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz). In July 2009, she was appointed assistant investigator at INEB (the first three years in the framework of Programa Ciência 2008). At INEB IAmaral has participated in 14 scientific projects in the field of regenerative medicine, as team member as well as principal investigator (I Amaral is the PI of two research projects). Isabel Amaral is also invited professor at the Faculdade de Engenharia do Porto since September 2009, in the framework of the Integrated MSc Course in Bioengineering.

Research interests:

• Functionalization of hydrogel matrices (natural or synthetic-based) at the molecular level with cell adhesive motifs and/or migration cues for transplantation of neural progenitors and to guide axonal regeneration in the CNS.
• Design of self-assembled hydrogels for application in regenerative therapies of the CNS.
• 3-D hydrogel platforms for neural tissue engineering
• Cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in 3D microenvironment
• Cellular mechanotransduction.