DIANA PRATA is a Principal Researcher at the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (UL) since 2018, where she founded the Biomedical Neuroscience laboratory after 12 years at King's College London, and three years at iMM Lisboa. She is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College London (KCL) and a member of ISCTE-IUL and FCT NOVA. Internationally recognized for her pioneering work combining genetics and neuroimaging during her PhD, her work has since expanded to include randomized placebo-controlled drug studies of oxytocin and dopaminergic drugs in humans using neuroimaging, electroencephalography, eye-tracking, pupillometry, skin conductance response, electrocardiography, proteomics and epigenetics. Her main research goal is understanding the biology of human social behaviour, e.g. what makes us understand, trust and befriend others, and create cooperative relationships – and help demonstrate how these mechanisms are to mental health and well-being. Her recent studies have looked at oxytocin and dopamine’s role in empathy, trust, cooperation, reward learning, salience attribution, and social dance-mediated bonding, including in the context of psychopathy, psychosis and autism. Using artificial intelligence, her team also develops software to aid the diagnosis of neurological and psychiatric diseases, which lead to the foundation of a startup. In addition to several university prizes and distinctions (from KCL, ISCTE and the University of Lisbon), she was honoured with the "Most Promising Scientist" award from the Marie Curie Actions 3rd Prize (2017) by the European Commission and has been sponsored with several prestigious grants and research contracts totalling over €2 million. Recently, she was ranked top 1st nation-wide in Psychology in the state-sponsored CEEC-IND competition by the government’s FCT foundation. She is the author of more than 70 articles and book chapters; and supervises a highly diverse and international team with backgrounds in biomedical engineering, biology, medicine, data science, psychology and anthropology – where there is a strong focus on team-work and a socially healthy environment.

2022-01-01 - Achievement Award (Associação de Investigadores e Estudantes Portugueses no Reino Unido | Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia)

2020-01-01 - Menções honrosas dos Prémios Científicos Universidade de Lisboa/Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Caixa Geral de Depósitos)

2017-01-01 - Achievement Award (European Commission)

- ()