teacher of Bahiana is the newest member of the Bahia Academy of Sciences

Photo: Matheus Trabuco

The researcher and professor of Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública Maria Fernanda Grassi is the newest member of the Bahia Academy of Sciences (ACB), in the area of ​​life sciences. The awarding ceremony took place on September 18, at Fiocruz. The ceremony was led by the president of the ACB, Manoel Barral, and was attended by the president of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Mário Moreira, the representative of the Rectory of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Olívia Oliveira, the former president of the ACB, Jailson Andrade, and the director of Fiocruz Bahia, Marilda de Souza Gonçalves, as well as researchers and students.

"I feel very honored to be part of the Bahia Academy of Sciences, an organization whose researchers are leaders in their fields and whose work is recognized. On the other hand, I am happy to see that the work I have developed, together with other people, such as students and collaborators, has received this recognition," said Grassi. According to the researcher, to follow the path of science, one must seek to solve problems that are often neglected even by academia. "I chose to work with diseases that are neglected, that are rarely seen, both by the academic community and by managers in the pharmaceutical industry. So, in this sense, I believe that we must seek to identify the problems and point out, through scientific methods, what the solutions are, the paths to be taken to solve them. I always tell my students to seek to work with topics that are relevant to society and, whenever possible, to listen to the patient community to see what solutions they need and, from there, work towards those solutions."

Maria Fernanda Grassi has a degree in Medicine from UFBA, a master's and doctorate in Immunology from the Université de Paris VII and a post-doctorate from Fiocruz. She is currently a senior researcher at Fiocruz Bahia and a professor at Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública, from the Postgraduate Course in Medicine and Human Health at Bahiana and the Postgraduate Program in Biotechnology and Investigative Medicine at Fiocruz Bahia, where he coordinates the Bioethics discipline. In research, he works mainly on the modulation of the immune response in infections by human retroviruses (HTLV-1, HIV).