Sara Leston Ferreira

Sara Isabel Falcão Navarro Leston Ferreira is a contracted researcher at the Department of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), where she also obtained her Degree in Biology, Masters in Ecology and PhD in Biology (area of Ecology). Currently, she develops her work activity at the CFE-Center for Functional Ecology, focusing on environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals in animal production systems, especially aquaculture. Moreover, she also focuses her research on the development of new analytical methodologies for the detection and quantification of contaminants in environmental and food related matrices such as fish, algae, water, sediment and soil. In the course of her PhD and thereafter she has gained expertise in environmental monitoring and risk assessment, while developing in-house research on exposure effects of non-target organisms to pharmaceuticals commonly used in aquaculture. Moreover, due to the lack of appropriate tools for quantification of such contaminants in environmental matrices such as algae, she has gathered expertise on method development and analytical analyses, with special focus on liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. Furthermore, her research also focuses on food security and safety, an area interconnected with environmental health. In addition to developing active research, she provides consultancy in terms of ecological risk assessment of plant protection products. Her scientific career includes over 40 published articles in indexed journals and 6 book chapters on her area of expertise and she also participated as a team member in several research projects. She has several participations in international conferences and has been actively involved in the supervision of PhD, MSc and graduate students.