Ana Rita Simões Ferraz, has been a Higher Education Teacher since September 2022 and currently serves as an invited assistant professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco (IPCB) (Polytechnic University). Her most relevant teaching areas include Food Biotechnology, Organic Chemistry, Synthesis Processes, Animal Biotechnology, Unit Operations, Transfer Phenomena, Bioreactors, Food Packaging, and New Product Development. In addition to her teaching activities at IPCB, she co-supervised 1 undergraduate thesis and currently supervises 3 undergraduate theses. Currently, Ana Ferraz is a collaborating member of CERNAS - Research Centre for Natural Resources, Environment, and Society, a research group in Food Science and Engineering, since February 2024.
Regarding Food Biotechnology, her work has focused on microbiology, biochemistry, as well as the development of new products, particularly edible coatings for food. Work in different areas has been carried out from an integrated and multidisciplinary perspective. In terms of analysis methodologies, she maintains a multidisciplinary perspective that includes microbiology techniques for biopigment production and evaluation of antimicrobial activity of natural products, characterization and chemical identification of natural compounds and biopigments by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with a diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) and mass spectrometry (LC-MS), and more recently on chromatography techniques and vibrational spectroscopy (FTIR) in edible coatings for cheese.
Ana Ferraz has the necessary background an interdisciplinary scientific profile in food biotechnology. In this research area, despite her young career, she has published 3 scientific articles as the first author, presented 4 posters at national/international congresses/conferences, and 2 oral scientific communications, and participated in 1 research projects funded by FCT and FEDER (PTDC/Bia-BQM/28355/2017). During her PhD, she developed methodologies that enabled the identification of microorganisms responsible for browning of cheese rind, in vitro pigment bioproduction, and the identification of the pigment produced by Pseudomonas.