Maria Ester Coutinho completed a Medical Degree at the University of Porto and a medical specialisation in Neurology at the Hospital Santo Antonio, Porto, Portugal. She was an awardee of the studentship from the Gulbenkian Programme for Advanced Medical Education and completed a DPhil degree (PhD equivalent in Oxford) in Clinical Neurosciences at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Oxford in 2017. Following her PhD studies, she worked as a clinical postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neurosciences and as an MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology clinical fellow at King's College London. Alongside her research at KCL, she worked as a Neurology consultant at King's College Hospital until June 2023, where she established and led a multidisciplinary specialist clinic for patients with neurological autoimmune diseases, and pioneered the neurology and neuropsychiatry pathway in one of the first national NHSE-funded specialist clinics for Post-COVID-19 syndrome (long COVID). In 2021 she was awarded a contract by the Fundacao Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) under the Individual Scientific Employment Stimulus call, which led her to take a junior researcher position at The Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) at the University of Coimbra. She published 40 academic papers (14 in the last 5 years, total citation >2000, h-index 23) (source: Google Scholar). Since becoming a Junior Researcher at the CNC she received 3 awards (as the PI) from the FCT, Brain Behaviour and Research Foundation and Sociedade Portuguesa de Neurologia (Total funding: 123K Euro). Alongside her clinical and research work, she was a module leader for the MSc in Clinical Neuropsychiatry at King's College Hospital (module: Scientific Foundations of Neuropsychiatry) and is an Invited Assistant Professor of the Medical course at the Católica Medical School, Lisbon (coordinator - module: Thinking and doing I; co-coordinator - module: Thinking and doing II). She currently supervises 1 PhD student and 2 MSc students. She organised and co-chaired a symposium of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Regional Meeting in 2023. She is a thesis comittee member of two ongoing PhD studies and was the main examiner of one master's thesis. She is a frequent invited speaker of seminars/lectures at international conferences or research institutes. She was awarded the Pre-Doctoral Plenary Competition first prize by the Academy of Medical Sciences, UK. She works in the areas of Medical & Health Sciences, with an emphasis on Neurology and Neuroimmunology.