Maria de Sousa

Maria Ângela Brito de Sousa was a Portuguese immunologist, science leader poet and writer. She gained international recognition as a medical researcher, as the author of several seminal scientific papers: she was the first to describe thymus-dependent areas in 1966, a fundamental discovery in the mapping of peripheral lymphoid organs; she coined the term "ecotaxis" in 1971, to describe the phenomenon of cells of different origins to migrate and to organize among themselves in very specific lymphoid areas. In the 1980s she focused on the study of hereditary hemochromatosis, an iron overload genetic disease.