Marta Silvestre is a researcher at CINTESIS in the area of nutrition and metabolism, at the NOVA Medical School, where she is currently a Guest Assistant Professor.

She was born in Sintra, in 1983. At 14, she developed an interest in food issues and, at 16, decided she wanted to be a nutritionist. At the time, there weren’t many Nutrition Science programs in Portugal. To make her dream come true she would have to move to Porto. She was young and would be a long time away from her family. She thought about trying Medicine and later specializing in Endocrinology.

“I applied for medicine in the Air Force, because of my high school average, and I went to Sintra for the first three months of recruiting. I hated it. It was extremely aggressive. I learned how to shoot a G3. It was terrible. I’m a very liberal person and I hated the concept of total lack of freedom, but I’m very persistent and I decided to finish the training, partly because it was a suggestion from my father, who is a very important person to me,” she stresses.

Meanwhile, she completed her first year of Nursing (2001-2002), a course she would eventually drop. “I was really struck by some things when I did fieldwork and house calls. I realized that I couldn’t be a nurse and probably not a doctor,” she confesses.

In 2002, she enrolled in the Faculty of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Porto (FCNAUP). Quickly, during the academic initiation practices, she made great friends, with whom she started sharing a house. She loved the study program from the very first year. It was there that she met Conceição Calhau, the current principal investigator of Thematic Line 1 – Preventive Medicine & Societal Challenges of CINTESIS. She finished her degree in 2007 (pre-Bologna). After an internship in the food industry, which didn’t captivate her, she started giving nutrition consultations in a medical clinic. But she still wasn’t happy.

“Most people had only an esthetic interest in achieving weight loss, and that approach didn’t captivate me. I became more interested in cases where nutrition was important in preventing and treating disease, namely type 2 Diabetes and other metabolic conditions associated with obesity. However, I often didn’t feel adequately prepared to address the complexity of the clinical conditions; I felt I should have a more personalized intervention and didn’t know if I was going the right way. I decided to go and learn more,” she recalls.

Her idea was to do a Master’s degree in Metabolism, but she was soon offered to do a Ph.D. For her Ph.D. project, she decided to study insulin resistance and obesity-related type 2 Diabetes and sent motivational letters literally to the whole world. She came close to going to the Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, and to Yale, in the United States. Then, in 2009, she received an offer from London, England, where she would live and study for four years as a scholarship holder of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

When she completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Lisbon Medical School/Queen Mary University of London in 2014, she sought a post-doc position in an international clinical nutrition research project. An offer was made to her from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, a 33-hour flight away. Accompanied by her husband in the adventure, she accepted to join the international working group and lead the New Zealand arm of the PREvention of Diabetes through Lifestyle Interventions in Europe and Worldwide (PREVIEW), project, which involved 13 institutions from eight countries (Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Spain, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand). The research was funded mostly by European Union funds.

“Adapting to New Zealand was fabulous. It’s a country with an immense quality of life. We started work early, at 7am, but by 4pm it was already over. The New Zealanders are very relaxed and very inclusive,” she recalls.

The goal of the project was to understand the effect of different lifestyle interventions on the incidence of diabetes in an at-risk population, in which all participants were overweight or obese and pre-diabetes. “A total of 1,224 people participated. The expectation was that in three years the incidence of diabetes mellitus in that population would be 15%. Only 3.9% developed the disease in that period, regardless of the type of intervention, showing that the important thing is to have continuous follow-up for behavioral and lifestyle changes,” she stressed.

She was supposed to stay only two years in New Zealand, but she stayed more than twice as long. From scholarship holder to researcher and professor at the University of Auckland. With a son born in New Zealand, she decided to return to Portugal in 2018, through Conceição Calhau, and joined CINTESIS. She continues to collaborate with the New Zealanders, from a distance, but she is not thinking of returning.

Author of dozens of publications in international scientific journals, she has received several scientific awards. She is also a member of the Portuguese Society of Diabetology (SPD) and a founding member of the Portuguese Society of Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism.

1-Year Ambition

We will start a new project, in collaboration with the Associação Protetora dos Diabéticos de Portugal (APDP), aiming to understand the relationship between secondary bile acids (metabolites of the intestinal microbiota, produced in the gut and partially reabsorbed by the circulation) and microvascular complications in diabetes, through metabolomic analysis and microbiota sequencing.

The main factor for complications is known to be hyperglycemia, but we want to see other mechanisms on which we can act. Bile acids are strong candidates.

10-Year Ambition

I plan to continue researching metabolic disease by analyzing multiple variables, with access to innovative and integrative methodologies such as metabolomics, microbiota, and genomics. There are many unanswered questions.

I will also continue to publish the results of the PREVIEW subanalyses still underway, both of epidemiological and clinical practice data.

We are applying for European funding for an international project that will be led by CINTESIS and NOVA Medical School, in collaboration with other countries, but the study objective is still confidential.

Life Beyond Teaching and Research

I like to skateboard. I started when I was 36 years old. My nephew taught me. I loved it. It is the hobby that gives me the most pleasure.

I like to do physical activity, I really like movies and reading novels about relationships between people, but I don’t have much time for any of these activities. And I play a lot with my son. I don’t enjoy it much anymore, but he does, and that’s what’s important.