Faculdade de Ciências ULisboa Names a Five-Month Biology Research-Initiation Bolsa for Carolina Fernandes-Henriques — Family-Funded Grant Honours a 30-Year-Old CUNY Neuroscientist and Targets Talent Retention Inside Portugal

The Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, FCUL) has named its newest undergraduate research grant after Carolina Fernandes-Henriques, the Portuguese neuroscientist who died unexpectedly in August 2024 at the age of 30 while finishing her postdoctoral training in New York. The grant was confirmed this week with applications scheduled to open in September 2026.

The Bolsa de Iniciação à Investigação Carolina Fernandes-Henriques (Carolina Fernandes-Henriques Research Initiation Grant) is a five-month research stipend reserved for third-year undergraduates enrolled in the FCUL Biology degree, in the Biology branch of the Erasmus inbound programme, or in any Biology-tagged minor for the 2026/2027 academic year. Selected students will develop a supervised research project under a faculty member from the FCUL Department of Biology, with selection criteria weighing academic performance, demonstrated research motivation, and documented extracurricular engagement — sports, the arts, volunteering, student associations, civic activity.

The grant is entirely family-funded, an explicit memorial decision by the Fernandes-Henriques family designed to anchor the kind of early-career encouragement that defined Carolina's own undergraduate years at Ciências. As an FCUL student she had won a Bolsa Fundação Amadeu Dias (Amadeu Dias Foundation Scholarship), competed at national level in swimming, gymnastics and athletics — picking up university and sub-23 titles — and served as an active student representative inside Mulheres na Ciência (Women in Science) initiatives.

She left Lisbon for the United States, completing a doctorate in Neurosciences at the City University of New York (CUNY) and beginning postdoctoral research on pain-circuitry mapping at one of the city's affiliated medical centres. Her death on 23 August 2024 was unexpected and left an unfinished line of work that her advisers in New York described publicly as among the most promising in her cohort.

FCUL leadership has framed the grant as part of a broader counter-brain-drain push. Portuguese life-sciences faculties have lost a steady stream of postgraduate talent to North American and northern European laboratories — a flow accelerated by the gap between US postdoctoral stipends and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Foundation for Science and Technology) reference values that anchor most domestic equivalents. By targeting the third undergraduate year, the bolsa attempts to embed early lab experience before the decision to leave hardens.

Five months is a deliberately compressed window. The model echoes FCUL's existing Bolsas de Investigação para Doutoramento Maria de Sousa (Maria de Sousa Doctoral Research Grants) but pitched two academic stages earlier, where the institution argues the marginal effect on retention is largest. Faculty supervisors will be drawn from the Department of Biology's running research groups, with priority given to projects that can produce a defensible deliverable inside the grant period.

The Fernandes-Henriques bolsa will run as a recurring annual call, contingent on the family's continued endowment. FCUL has indicated it will publish the full regulamento, the supervisor list and the application portal closer to the September opening. A second commemorative track — a Faculdade-sponsored seminar on translational neuroscience in Carolina's name — is being weighed for the 2027 academic calendar but has not been formally announced.

For Biology undergraduates currently entering their second year at Ciências, the grant is one of the few new research-track openings inside the 2026/2027 cycle that does not pass through the FCT competitive funnel.