Mariana G. Domingos first joined LSRE-LCM during her undergraduate studies at Faculty of Engineering University of Porto (FEUP), when she collaborated as part-time student researcher in two different projects. In 2007, supervised by Cláudia Gomes da Silva and Joaquim Faria, she performed kinetic experiments of the Photocatalytic Degradation of Ciprofloxacin. A year later, supervised by Manuela Vilarinho and José Miguel Loureiro, she worked on Decyl Acetate Synthesis by enzymatic catalysis in supercritical CO₂, towards the acquisition of the kinetic model parameters for this reaction.

In her final semester of Integrated Masters in Chemical Engineering (2009), she moved to the Netherlands, under the ERASMUS programme, to develop her Master’s dissertation on Interfacing Metal Organic Frameworks with Structured Supports in the Catalysis Group of TU Delft, supervised by Enrique Ramos Fernandez, Jorge Gascon and Freek Kapteijn.

Her interest to develop fundamental knowledge in Fluid Dynamics took her to the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where she did a PhD in Turbulent Plumes and Thermals with Internal Buoyancy Changes, under the supervision of Silvana C. C. Cardoso (2009-2013). During her thesis she used mostly analytical and experimental methods to understand the impact of chemical reactions in accidental releases in the ocean and the atmosphere, with application to the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010) and the Fukushima Nuclear Clouds (2011).

After her PhD, she worked for about 4 years in Research & Development in Industrial Environments. For about a year she worked as a Fluid Dynamics Engineer at Xaar, a company manufacturing inkjet printheads for industrial applications. She then moved to the Clean Air division of Johnson Matthey, United Kingdom, to work as Research Scientist for a government funded project, looking at the scale up/down of washcoat formulations (EMFormR – Embedding Manufacturing Development into Formulation Research). After the end of the EMFormR, she worked as a Process Research and Development Engineer, in a team focused on the process standardization, ‘best practice’ definitions and introduction of process step changes.

In 2018, it was time to come home, she came back to the LSRE-LCM mixing team, under the supervision of José Carlos Lopes. She will be part of the NET4CO₂ project focusing on CO₂ valorisation.