Maria Ester Coutinho completed a Medical Degree at the University of Porto and a medical specialisation in Neurology at Hospital Santo Antonio, Porto, Portugal. She received a 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 works (32 research articles and 8 reviews/book chapters), 9 as first author. Her publications, 90% in top 25% journals, have garnered 2466 citations, resulting in an h-index of 25 (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. She established the Portuguese Clinical Network for the Study of AE (GENIE, 2023) and created an online platform for the disease (encefalites.pt). Her work is well-recognized, with invitations to speak at 17 national and international conferences in the last 6 years. She organized and co-chaired a symposium at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Regional Meeting in 2023. She received 8 awards, including the Academy of Medical Sciences' joint first prize for predoctoral fellows (2017) and the Brain Behavior and Research Foundation Young Investigator Award (2023). She works in the areas of Medical & Health Sciences, with an emphasis on Neurology and Neuroimmunology.