She received her PhD from the University of Coimbra, Portugal for her work studying the dysregulation of mitochondrial function in cellular and rodent models of neurodegeneration. While a postdoctoral fellow at the Gladstone Institute for Neurological Disease, University of California San Francisco and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, her research focused on reprogramming patient cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Specifically, she generated multiple iPSC lines from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and ALS/FTD patients carrying mutations such as progranulin, C9ORF72, TDP-43 and MAPT, as well as the respective heathy controls. She differentiated these iPSC lines into human neurons and using these models her studies have uncovered a number of molecular and cellular defects relevant to the human disease.