Luisa M.P.F Amaral graduated in Chemistry from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, and completed her PhD in Physical Chemistry and Thermodynamics at the same university. L. Amaral worked as a research assistant in the Molecular and Supramolecular Thermodynamics group at CIQUP until 2014. Her expertise lies in both experimental and computational thermochemical study of homocyclic and heterocyclic organic compounds, particularly in evaluating how steric, electrostatic, and stereoelectronic interactions from various substituents influence the thermodynamic stability of these molecules. Additionally, she contributes to the development of predictive models for the enthalpies of formation in the gas phase for compounds that lack experimental data.
From 2016 to 2019, she joined UCIBIO/REQUIMTE as an Assistant Researcher contributing to the project, “New technologies for three health challenges of modern societies: diabetes, drug abuse and kidney diseases”.
Presently, she holds the position of Research Assistant at LAQV/REQUIMTE (University of Porto). L. Amaral's recent research focuses on developing chelators to enhance the bioavailability of insulin-like vanadium and zinc compounds.
Ana R.R.P. Almeida is a Researcher at Faculty of Sciences of University of Porto. She graduated in Biochemistry (2001) and received her MSc (2004) and her PhD (2013, approved with distinction) both in chemistry, from the University of Porto. Her research interests include the study of the volatility, phase transitions and intermolecular interactions of organic compounds. She is mainly focused on experimental measurements of vapor pressures of organic compounds (solids and liquids with pharmacological interest and/or with pesticide activity) and the determination of their enthalpies, entropies and Gibbs energies of sublimation, vaporization and fusion. More recently, she has been very interested in the development of user-friendly methods for predicting several physico-chemical properties of organic compounds, with important applications in predicting their environmental mobility: sublimation and vaporization vapor pressures, Gibbs energy of hydration, aqueous solubility, Henry constants and octanol-water partition coefficients. The determination of energies of intermolecular hydrogen bonds O-H...O, N-H...N and N-H...O in organic crystalline compounds and the evaluation of the thermodynamic stability of chemical compounds has also been the subject of her study.
