Carolina Mota Natal has a Bachelor´s degree in Biochemistry (July 2018, 14/20) and a Master's Degree in Chemical Analysis and Characterization Techniques (April 2021, 18/20) both from the University of Minho. In the final individual BSc project in Biochemistry she studied a series of triphenylamine derivatives as fluorimetric ion probes in biomedical settings. Her master's thesis (2020-2021) was part of a FCT-funded project "BioP&FoodP: Biopesticides and Food Preservatives from Nanoencapsulated Plant Extracts: Biological Evaluation, Molecular Modelling and Synthesis (PTDC/ASP-AGR/30154/2017)", with the title "Derivatives of natural compounds with potential application as biopesticides ". During her thesis, she chemically synthesized and further purified derivatives of natural compounds. Carolina also characterized these new compounds by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry. Her master thesis resulted in one peer-reviewed paper as a first author published in RSC Advances, one oral presentation and paper presented at an international conference. She was part of a project funded by FEDER - SMASUS project (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-047007) from March 2022 to June 2023. From this work, she presented three posters and one oral communication at international conferences. She was part of a project funded by European Union's Horizon 2020 - PURE project (Grant agreement No 899732) from july to december 2023. Currently, she is a PhD student in Biotechnology at UCIBIO, NOVA-FCT (2023.01023.BD). Daily, she works with HPLC/NMR/MS techniques, organic chemistry, affinity ligands, quantification of proteins and electrophoresis methods. Carolina mentored an academic student from Germany. She is interested in combining chemistry and biotechnology to develop new affinity ligands to purify recombinant proteins.