About

Mariana Alves, Ph.D., is a staff scientist in the Drug Discovery Division at the Lieber Institute. She joined the in vivo pharmacology research group led by Dr. Carr in August 2025. Her research focuses on identifying novel therapeutics for treating neurological and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia. Dr. Alves' prior work at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, primarily centered on studying the purinergic signaling system in epilepsy and the impact of modulating ATP-gated channels on seizures and epilepsy. Dr. Alves earned her Ph.D. in Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Tobias Engel, and she holds a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and a M.Sc. in Molecular and Cell Biology with a specialization in Neuroscience from the University of Coimbra, Portugal.