Sara did her integrated masters in Biomedical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, and completed her Ph.D. in Bioengineering Systems through the MIT-Portugal Program.
Her graduate research was conducted at the Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal, on how serotonin modulates behavioral adaptation and learning.
Currently, as a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Naoshige Uchida’s lab, she investigates how populations of dopamine neurons encode full distributions of expected outcomes, to uncover how distributional reinforcement learning is implemented in the brain.