PAULO MARTINS
Associate Researcher
BIOGRAPHY
Paulo Martins was born on the 27th of May 1983 in Coimbra, Portugal. In 2006, he obtained his degree in Physics from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra. That same year, he joined the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics – LIP where he carried out his seminar thesis devoted to the construction and operation of a spark chamber for the detection of cosmic rays. This device has been commercialized for outreach purposes all over the world. In 2007, he became a member of the Portuguese team at the ATLAS collaboration, CERN. His Master thesis focused on the properties of the quark top and the study of the anomalous couplings of the Wtb vertex with muons. In 2009, he worked at CERN on the calibration and monitoring of the Tile Calorimeter – TileCal. In 2010, he joined the RPC-PET group as a PhD student. For 3.5 years, he was strongly involved on the demonstration of a small-animal RPC-PET prototype with an unprecedented image spatial resolution of 0.4 mm FWHM. Concurrently, he was also strongly engaged in the development of a reconstruction routine for a human RPC-PET system with an axial field-of-view of 2.4 m. In 2014, he concluded his PhD in Experimental Physics from the University of Coimbra with distinction and honors. In 2015, he started a 6-months internship at the European Patent Office – EPO, The Hague, in the directorate of medical technology. Soon afterwards, he was awarded a postdoctoral grant in medical engineering to continue research in RPC-PET technology. In 2016, he started a Post-Doc under Prof. João Seco in the research program imaging and radiooncoloy at the German Cancer Research Center – DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany. He is currently working on the development of a prompt gamma imaging prototype that allows simultaneously in-vivo accurate positioning of the Bragg peak and monitoring of elemental compositions in a particle therapy environment. In 2017, he has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers to go on with his work at DKFZ. He is a member of the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon – IBEB and works on the research line of cancer therapy and drug delivery.
