Rita Abranches is a Principal Investigator and the head of the Plant Cell Biology Laboratory at ITQB NOVA. Rita Abranches graduated in Agricultural Engineering in 1995 at the University of Lisbon, after which she enrolled in the Gulbenkian PhD Program in Biology and Medicine at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia. She did her PhD project at the John Innes Centre UK, on the relationship between nuclear architecture and expression of genes and transgenes in plants. During this period she was awarded the prize Young Cell Biologist of the Year 1998, by the British Society for Cell Biology. After obtaining her PhD degree in 2000 by the University of East Anglia UK, she moved to the USA as research associate at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Here her research focused on strategies to improve expression of foreign genes in plants, and she became interested in more applied aspects of cell biology. In 2002 she returned to Portugal as a postdoctoral fellow at ITQB NOVA, where she developed her research interests on the use of plants as alternative systems for the production of biopharmaceuticals. Rita established her independent research group at ITQB in 2004: the Plant Cell Biology Laboratory. http://www.itqb.unl.pt/labs/plant-cell-biology. Rita Abranches has supervised PhD and Master students as well as postdoc researchers and has several teaching duties as lecturer and coordinator of curricular units in national and international universities. She regularly participates in numerous science outreach activities promoted by ITQB NOVA. For updated information on publications see: http://www.itqb.unl.pt/labs/plant-cell-biology/publications and Google Scholar ID: Rita Abranches (https://scholar.google.pt/citations?user=r-pmyAcAAAAJ&hl=pt-PT). Since 2004 Rita has been involved in multiple national and international projects, 11 of them as coordinator. Along these years she established an extensive network of national and international collaborations and has presented her work in numerous conferences. The main objective of her current research is to integrate the fundamental and applied aspects of Molecular Farming - the production of high value molecules in plant based systems. These high value molecules include recombinant proteins and bioactive compounds, with applications in human health and nutrition. Rita Abranches Lab works with model and non-model plant systems and microalgae.