Former INESC-ID PhD student and researcher in Human Language Technologies (HLT), Catarina Botelho, was awarded first place in the category “Health Systems / Entrepreneurship / Digital Transition” of the ULisboa RedeSAÚDE awards 2025.

The goal of the Awards is to motivate the interest of PhD and master’s students, from the University of Lisbon, in the health sector. Additionally it seeks to promote innovative research, best practices and knowledge sharing that could contribute to the development of the area. The ceremony took place on November 26 during the 9th Annual Conference of redeSAÚDE, under the theme “People and Planet: How the Environment Shapes Human Health”. 

The work which earned Catarina this prize was developed while conducting her PhD, “Leveraging Large Language Models to Support Alzheimer’s Disease Detection”. It was advised by INESC-ID HLT researchers Isabel Trancoso and Alberto Abad, and Tanja Schultz from Bremen  University, and it explored the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analysing speech transcriptions and recognise certain features (e.g. text coherence and lexical diversity) that could indicate a possibility of Alzheimer’s Disease in a patient.

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