Ana Sofia Augusto

Sofia Augusto is Researcher at EPIUnit since 2016 where she is working on her postdoctoral project “Protecting citizens from environmental hazards: biomonitors and biomarkers of integrated human exposure to environmental POPs and other emerging pollutants”.

The project aims at assessing human chronic exposure to environmental pollutants, building spatial exposure models that integrate pollutant monitoring data obtained by different methods (air, soil, water, food, and ecological biomonitors). In addition, it aims at developing environmental health indicators, based on non-invasive techniques, to assess genotoxic effects of human exposure to mixtures of pollutants. To successfully accomplish this project, Sofia is actively collaborating with the eChange group of cE3c (University of Lisbon, Portugal, http://echanges.fc.ul.pt/index.html) and with the TecnATox group (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain, http://www.tecnatox.cat/).

Sofia Augusto has first graduated in Applied Plant Biology in 2001 and in Food Safety and Technology in 2007. In July 2012 she obtained her Ph.D. in Biology (expertise Ecology) at University of Lisbon with the thesis entitled “Development of a technology for biomonitoring atmospheric deposition of toxic organic compounds and evaluation of their impact on ecosystem and human health”. In 2014 she moved (for two years) to Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, to develop an Intra-European Marie Curie project financed by the European Commission in the field of Air Pollution Biomonitoring (http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/187029_en.html).

Research interests: Biomonitoring, Environmental health, Semi-volatile organic compounds, Persistent organic compounds, Heavy metals, Ecotoxicology, Atmospheric pollution, Air, water and soil pollution, Food safety