Joana Serra will be defending her PhD thesis in Bioengineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, friday the 7th June 2019 (10:30 H, room Q4.41). During the last years, and under the supervision of Miguel Prazeres from BERG-iBB and Cláudia Lobato-Silva from SCERG-iBB, Joana focused her efforts on the genetic modification of mesenchymal stem/stromal cells with VEGF-coding minicircles to improve their therapeutic features in the context of ischemia. The title of her thesis is "Ex-vivo gene therapy to improve the regenerative features of human mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSC) in a model of limb ischemia".