Rate My Professor Celia Regina da Silva Garcia

Célia Regina da Silva Garcia is a Full Professor (Professora Titular) at the Department of Clinical and Toxicological Analyses in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Universidade de São Paulo, a position she has held since 2001, with additional responsibilities in the department from 2018 onward. She earned a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1981, followed by a master's degree in Biophysics from the same institution in 1987 and a doctorate in Biophysics in 1990, which included a sandwich doctorate and internships at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Boston and the University of the Pacific in California. Her postdoctoral training took place at King's College and the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, as well as at the National Institute of Bioscience and Human Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. She has also served as a visiting professor in the Department of Pathology at New York University from 2004 to 2005 and as an adjunct professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Garcia's research centers on how chemical signals in the pathogen-host relationship modulate the cell cycle of the malaria parasite, with key lines of investigation including the screening of synthetic and natural compounds for new antimalarial drugs and the study of G protein-coupled receptors in Plasmodium falciparum through pharmacological screening, molecular approaches, and cell imaging. She is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the São Paulo State Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology. Garcia has served as an associate editor for Current Research in Microbial Sciences and Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, and as a member of editorial boards for journals including Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology, Methods X, Current Opinion in Microbiology, Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, and Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. She coordinated the USP Research Nucleus on Cell Signaling in Pathogen-Host Interaction from 2012 to 2018, chaired the Research Commission of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences from 2020 to 2022, and has advised national and international agencies such as the Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, and others. She currently advises the USP Pro-Rectory of Graduate Studies and has held committee roles with CNPq.