Hélia Fernandes is a Bioengineer with a master’s degree in Molecular Biotechnology, completed at the University of Porto (Faculty of Engineering and Institute of Biomedical Sciences Abel Salazar) in 2017. During her master's, Hélia performed a five months curricular internship in Germany under the Erasmus+ program, in collaboration with the Munich School of Bioengineering and under the supervision of Dr. Angela Otto. The work that studied the “Effect of different glutamine and glucose concentrations, addition of lactate and hypoxia incubation on the metabolism of two cancer cell lines” was presented at 2 International Cancer Meetings. Afterward, Hélia started to develop her Master Dissertation at the Bioengineered Surfaces Group, at i3s (Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde, Universidade do Porto). The dissertation was entitled “Development of Antimicrobial Coatings based on Antimicrobial Peptides, supervised by Dr. Claúdia Monteiro and co-supervised by Dr. Cristina Martins. From June 2019 to March 2020, Hélia was involved in the identification of environmental signals that drive Hematopoietic Stem Cell self-renewal versus differentiation in vitro and also in the differentiation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells from human embryonic stem cells. The work was supervised by Dr. João Moura and co-supervised by Dr. Perpétua Pinto-do-Ó.