B.Sc. in Pharmacy from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Porto (1991) and Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP) in 1999. She is Associate Professor, Director of CBQF – State Associate Laboratory and Associate Director of the College of Biotechnology of UCP. She is the leader of Biobased and Biomedical products group and coordinates the Bioactives and Bioproducts Research Laboratory. She has established strong interaction with industry mainly in food sector. Main research interest include development and characterization of bioactives and by-product valorisation through bioprocesses and extraction processes aiming to obtain high-added value products to be applied to Food and other industries. During her scientific trajectory, she published several papers (currently more than 430 papers) in refereed international journals and authored 55 chapters in handbooks on these topics, and creator of 20 patents and she supervises(ed) or co-supervises(ed) 40 PhD thesis. She has a h-index of 47 with more ca. 9000 citations.  Additionally, she has been responsible for the coordination and co-coordination of 90 externally funded (through national and international funds) research and development projects among which ALCHEMY – Capturing High Value from Industrial Fermentation BioProducts will be highlighted. Given her overall curricular merit, she has been recognized by the Ciência Viva program as one of the female faces of the Portuguese science community in its book dedicated to Portuguese scientist women.

Orcid iD: org/ 0000-0002-0760-3184