Mariana Branco is an Assistant Doctoral Researcher at Accelbio. As a researcher, Mariana has now 7 years of experience in working with human pluripotent stem cells in the cardiac field. In the past years, she has been dedicated to bring together bioengineer and developmental biology concepts to achieve innovative and cutting-edge in vivo inspired platforms that recreate heart organogenesis in vitro. Since 2021 she has been focused on translating cardiac organoid models for developmental cardiotoxicity screening applications, aiming to overcome the limited available data in humans regarding teratogenicity of already available or new developed drugs. Mariana holds an MSc in Biological Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and a PhD in Bioengineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon.