New seminar series brings international experts to ITQB NOVA
Oeiras, 23rd September 2025
Science grows from collaboration and the sharing of ideas and knows no borders. With this in mind, this new series of monthly seminars will begin on Thursday, 25th September 2025, with the first invited speaker being Prof. N. Luísa Hiller from Carnegie Mellon University. Individual meetings with the speaker will be available in the afternoon upon registration.
The series’ name was inspired by the sketch comedy film, launched in 1971. Just like the movie, which aimed to reach those who did not have had the chance to experience Monty Python’s humor, which until then was restricted to British TV, the seminar series brings a space to share science in a broader context, encouraging discussion, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas beyond borders. “It seeks to offer a different perspective, bringing a personal view of the challenges each researcher faces in their field, combining science with individual experiences and reflections”, explains Maria João Tavares, head of the Internationalization office.
Her presentation will explore the human upper respiratory tract with Streptococcus pneumoniae, examining the bacterial lexicon, the vocabulary and grammar of this colonizer, and mechanisms of bacterial communication across single-strain, multi-strain, and multi-species contexts. She will also address how collaboration and competition shape the upper respiratory tract as an ecological niche.
Prof. Hiller’s research focuses on microbial molecular mechanisms associated with disease, with a particular emphasis on Streptococcus pneumoniae, a pathogen responsible for over one million deaths annually among children and the elderly. In its commensal form, S. pneumoniae colonizes the human nasopharynx asymptomatically; in its pathogenic form it disseminates to other tissues, causing mild or severe disease. Her work investigates how microbes transition from commensal coexistence to pathogenesis, with attention to microbial ecology and the etiology of respiratory diseases.
