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. This project funded by the European Research Council has a funding of 1,87 million euros, to be developed in 5 years. In 2018, co-founded Des Solutio, a spin-off company from FCT_NOVA which aims to develop safer and greener alternatives to the chemicals that are usually used in the production of beauty, pharmaceutical, personal care and other products.

At the moment, she has 97 papers listed in web of knowledge with a total of 2470 citations, and an h-index of 32. Her main research interests are the use of green technologies for the development of biomaterials. In particular, the use of water, and supercritical fluids together with the exploration of natural deep eutectic solvents for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications.