Ana Maria Seca

Group Leader

Azores Chemistry of Natural Compounds Secondary Metabolites Environmental Stress

I am Associate Professor with Habilitation in Chemistry, at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Azores. I hold a PhD in Chemistry, a Master's degree in Science and Technology of Paper and Forest Products, and a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, specializing in Analytical Chemistry, from the University of Aveiro. I joined to the University of the Azores in 1999 as Assistant, progressing to the position of Assistant Professor in 2000 and then Associate Professor in 2023. In 2023, I obtained the Habilitation in Chemistry from the University of Beira Interior. I have received additional training in the areas of: i) medicinal chemistry (FFUP); ii) information technologies; iii) laboratory safety (UA).

I currently collaborate with several overlapping research groups principally working on a range of chemistry of natural compounds and biological activity assessment as LAQV-REQUIMTE (Universidade de Aveiro), Instituto Universitário de Bioorgânica “António Gonzalez” (University of La Laguna, Tenerife), Institute of Chemistry and Biotechnology (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), INSTITUTE OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY WITH CENTRE OF PHYTOCHEMISTRY (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria).

My current main research interest is Bioactive natural compounds from plants and macroalgae with potential applications in health promotion and/or as biopesticides, showing the importance of biodiversity to the discovery of novel added-value compounds and provide nature-based solutions to the human and planet problems. The isolation and identification of secondary metabolites using chromatographic (TLC, CC, HPLC, GC) and spectroscopic (NMR and MS) techniques, complemented with the synthesis and structural modification of natural compounds derivatives to increase bioactivity, and the evaluation of the biological activity of the compounds obtained is the main approach carried out.