Curriculum Vitae
My name is Catarina Rua and I'm a Marie Curie fellow of the Ultra-high field MR project working in functional MRI at the IMAGO7 foundation in Pisa, IT.
I finished my degree in 2012 in Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics at the university of Lisbon, PT, with the final thesis developed at the University of Cambridge, UK, entitled "Analysis in Magnetic Resonance Elastography: study and development of image processing techniques", supervised by Dr. Marius Mada and Dr. Alexandre Andrade. I used MR as a tool to extract meaningful elasticity parameters of the brain, both by working on acquisition methods as well as understanding inversion algorithms for post-acquired data.
The following year I took part of a research project led by Prof. Paul Fletcher at the Brain Mapping Unit (BMU), department of Psychiatry, in Cambridge where our main focus were theories of brain gyrification, namely trying to explain how a brain folds and morphologically develops through life.
From the end of 2013 I was granted a Marie Curie doctoral scholarship at the University of Pisa to work on ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging with the supervision of Prof. A. del Guerra, Prof. M. Tosetti and Dr. M. Costagli.

Research Interests
My research interests have gradually narrowed down into the MR field exploring the complex systems of the human body, and in particular the mechanical and functional processes of the brain throughout its lifespan. Hence, in my doctoral project I'm mostly interested on decoding the functional architecture of the early visual cortex in humans at a sub-millimeter level.