Michael F. Almeida connects with students through research
The Rebecca Clark Staff Award for Moral Courage winner is training the next generation of biomedical researchers.
Ten years ago, when Michael Fernandes de Almeida came to the U.S. from Brazil, he knew he wanted to be involved in research to help others but wasn’t sure how.
He came to the U.S. to join his wife, Karen Farizatto, then a postdoctoral fellow at UNC Pembroke. He worked at UNC Pembroke and UNC Wilmington and before moving to Chapel Hill in 2023 and taking on research roles that help bring awareness to health and the aging process.
“I have loved the community,” said Almeida. “I felt welcomed with the people I interacted with. There are people here from everywhere in the world, but it doesn’t matter where you came from. It just matters that I’m now part of the Carolina community.”
As a postdoctoral research fellow at the McAllister Heart Institute at the UNC School of Medicine, he does research focused on cell resiliency in health and disease, specifically age-related diseases. He looks at changes in people’s resilience due to different diseases, hoping to understand the aging process and how it is affected by disease.
Almeida looks at the protein quality control, or homeostasis, of the proteins inside cells and how that drives recycling and generation of new proteins inside the cell.
He became interested in this type of research to understand how we can improve human health, looking at how elderly people age based on their lifestyle when they were younger. His previous studies focused on physical exercise and improving health along with neuroscience and Alzheimer’s disease.
Almeida shares his passion with undergraduate students at Carolina, training the next generation of biomedical researchers. During the academic year, he has about 25 undergraduate students working with him in the lab, where he guides and mentors them.
That work has earned Almeida this year’s Rebecca Clark Staff Award for Moral Courage. The award recognizes a staff member who has demonstrated a strong commitment to social justice, especially with regard to the treatment of fellow workers. Nominators cited his willingness to advocate for his students, as well as fostering an environment of fairness and respect that exemplifies his brave, supportive and selfless approach to leadership.
When he received an email about his award, he didn’t believe it was true and waited for a phone call for confirmation.
Once the award was confirmed, Almeida was overjoyed when he realized that former students had nominated him. He’ll be recognized at the University Day celebration Oct. 12 at Memorial Hall.
“I’m so glad I can make the lab the most enjoyable space possible for them,” he said. “They want to come to the lab each day because they enjoy the environment and mentorship. It makes me proud of my own work and proud that I can make every day better than yesterday for my students.”
Almeida is excited to keep doing that at Carolina, where he’d like to pursue kinesiology. His goal is to one day run his own lab as a principal investigator, perhaps reunited with some of his students.
