Rita Sousa, a former PhD student at LASIGE, and current PhD collaborator, has been awarded by FCiências.ID for the excellence of her PhD thesis in Computer Science and Engineering. Her thesis, “Semantic perspectives for learning over biomedical knowledge graphs”, was defended in 2024.

The PhD work focused on developing novel methods to generate representations of entities in biomedical knowledge graphs, aiming to make machine learning models that explore those representations both more accurate and easier to understand. Through extensive experiments on predicting protein-protein interactions and gene-disease associations, her work demonstrated that semantic aspect-oriented representations improve both predictive performance and explainability, fostering biomedical research. Learn more about her thesis here.

Rita is currently a researcher on a German-funded project focused on early diabetes detection at the Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim.