Isabel Gordo is a principal investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal. She graduated in Physics and received a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics from the University of Edinburgh in 2002. Her Postdoctoral research was carried out at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência where she then became leader of the Evolutionary Biology group in 2004. In 2010 she won an ERC Starting Grant, in 2015 a FCT Investigator Consolidator Grant and in 2023 an ERC Advanced Grant . She founded the Portuguese Society for Evolutionary Biology, serves as panel member and meanwhile vice-chair of the ERC grants evaluation since 2014, was elected EMBO member in 2017 and FEMS member in 2020. Her current research combines theoretical and empirical methods aiming at a better understanding of the major forces that shape genomic diversity of bacteria and their levels of resistance to antibiotics, in the context of the gut microbiome. She uses Escherichia coli as a model organism of bacteria and mice as a host model system to understand host-microbiome interactions.