Ana Rita C. Duarte

Ana Rita C. Duarte was born in Lisbon in 1978. Currently Associate Professor at the Chemistry Department from Faculdade de Ciências  Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was previsously Research Assistant at the 3B’s research group at Universidade do Minho, where she worked for 10 years. She graduated in Chemical Engineering by Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2002 and completed her PhD on Exploring supercritical fluid technology for the preparation of controlled drug delivery systems in 2006 by the same University. In 2006/2007 she was a researcher at Techniche Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands.

The International Society for Advancement of Supercritical Fluids granted her thesis the Best Thesis Award in 2007. In 2013 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholar to support her stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was for a period of 6 months. In 2015 as part of the team of the project HydrUStent, Ana Rita won the Novo Banco Innovation Award, one of the major innovations awards in Portugal and in 2016 she co-founded the start-up HydrUStent. In 2016 she was awarded an ERC consolidator grant entitled: DES.solve – When Solids Become Liquids: Natural Deep Eutectic solvents for Chemical Process Engineering,  to proceed the developments on green technologies.

At the moment, she has 80 papers listed in web of knowledge with a total of 1723 citations, and an h-index of 25. Her main research interests are the use of green technologies for the development of biomaterials. In particular, the use of water, ionic liquids, supercritical fluids together with the exploration of natural deep eutectic solvents for natural-based polymer processing are her main scientific interests.