Ana Margarida Duarte Salgueiro completed her integrated master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences in September 2022 from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Coimbra. She wrote her master thesis entitled "Gene Therapy of Huntington's Disease", where she delved deeper into the different therapeutic approaches and strategies being developed in in the pre-clinical and clinical phases, with special emphasis on gene therapy strategies for Huntington's Disease and other polyglutamine diseases. The quality of the work was recognized with a mark of excellence (18 in 20). Motivated by the scientific curiosity and the relevance of the field of disorders with no treatment, she has been collaborating and working in the international recognized group led by Professor Luís Pereira de Almeida - group “Gene and Stem Cell Therapies” at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra (CNC-UC). She started in this group with an internship as an undergraduate student and had the opportunity to participate in two funded projects in the context of Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3/Machado-Joseph Disease. This internship and her commitment, participation and interest in the research work was recognized as co-authorship in two communications (poster and an oral communication) presented at the international congress, 29th European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Congress. During six months she was a Voluntary Researcher but more recently, since March 2023, she was granted with a competitive research fellowship to continue to do research work in the same group, always with big interest in Machado-Joseph Disease (MJD). Her growing interest in polyglutamine diseases and therapies in development led her to participate in the HDYO International Young Adult Congress in Glasgow, a congress that brings together young people from all over the world linked to Huntington's disease, and to join the Portuguese Association of Huntington's Patients, to better understand the highly debilitating reality of these genetic diseases. Learning and investigating more about these diseases is very closed to Margarida because she sees firsthand how debilitating these diseases are, since her father suffers from Huntington´s disease and she´s also at risk of having the same disease and she wants to be able to change that through the work she is doing and will do. She has an Advanced Certificate in English through the Cambridge English Language Assessment, which means she has a good command of the English language.