Ana M. Tomás is an Associate Professor in Parasitology at Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar, University of Porto (ICBAS-UP) and the leader of the Molecular Parasitology Group at Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S) in Portugal. She earned her MSc (in Medical Parasitology, 1988) and PhD (in Molecular Parasitology, 1995) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of London. She then carried out post -doctoral studies (1995-97) at the Malaria laboratory of the University of Leiden NL, before returning to Portugal in 1998 to initiate her academic career. She is an expert in protozoology her experience extending to several protozoan pathogens (e.g Trypanosoma cruzi, Plasmodium, Leishmania). Ana Tomás scientific interests concern the mechanisms of parasite adaptation and subsistence in their hosts. She expects her studies to impact research on intracellular parasitism and other areas of knowledge and, ultimately, to be exploited for therapy. Resorting to a multidisciplinary approach that combines molecular, cell biology and biochemistry methodologies with in vitro and in vivo models of infection, her group made decisive contributes towards the dissection of the antioxidant mechanisms of Leishmania (most recently, Redox Biology, 2024), a unique and sophisticated network of enzymes that protect parasites from oxidants - including those host-and drug-derived. She described a novel, stress-activated mechanism of Leishmania virulence crucial for parasites to successfully transit from their insect to mammalian hosts (PLoS Pathogens, 2011; PNAS, 2015; Nature Communication, 2019), a major achievement of the group with impacts well beyond the parasitology field. The group interests extend to aspects of Leishmania mitochondrial metabolism (PNAS, 2021) and mechanisms of nutritional virulence (Mol. Microbiology, 2015). ATomás has been PI of different projects and participated in many others. She was National Delegate in three EU COST Networks being vice-chair of one (CM1307, Target therapy towards diseases caused by endoparasites), acted as a member of the Scientific Committee of several international meetings and organized different international meetings, as well as a high number of seminars. She supervised, or is supervising, 5 Post-doctoral fellows, 10 PhD, 19 MSc students, some from international universities, and 8 research assistants and is responsible for the Parasitology Course of the University of Porto PhD programme GABBA (http://gabba.up.pt/). She has published over 70 research articles and several book chapters and was invited as a guest of international meetings as prestigious as the Gordon Conferences, EMBO Workshops or The Society for General Microbiology (UK).