Filipa Santos, obtained her PhD degree in Biochemistry-Molecular Biophysics with distinction on January 6th, 2023. F.Santos is currently working as a researcher at Molecular Biophysics lab and started on February 1st 2024 as Invited Assistant Professor 40% at FCUL. She finished working in a FCT funded project (EXPL/BIA-BFS/1034/2021) on December 31st, 2023. F.Santos graduated in Biochemistry in 2008 at Évora University. The knowledge acquired during the thesis was later proven to be crucial for the development of the PhD project, since she gained a deep interest about fungi. In 2009, she was awarded a competitive fellowship (BD-Mic/12A/08) to work in the European project "Safewater - Development and validation of integrated drinking water treatment processes in Portugal and Norway" (EEA Grants Financial Mechanism) at IBET, where she used state-of-the-art analytical and decontamination techniques using real water samples. In 2011, she completed the MSc. in Inorganic Biomedical Chemistry in Organometallic lab at Lisbon University, on anticancer metallodrugs, more specifically their interaction with biomolecules. After her MSc., she was awarded several competitive research fellowships to work in FCT funded projects (PTDC/Qui-Qui/101187/2008; PTDC/Qui-Qui/118077/2010), which endowed her with expertise in several other techniques, such as hydrodynamic viscosity, lipophilicity studies, cytotoxicity in tumoral cell lines and genotoxicity (Ames test, performed at the Genetics Department, NOVA Medical School). Her work in these projects resulted in 4 publications in J.Inorg.Biochem. and 1 in BioMetals. She also acquired knowledge that would be extremely useful for the PhD project, since she has learned how to handle light and oxygen sensitive compounds and had the first contact with Molecular Biophysics and the lab of her future PhD supervisor, where she was hired as a research fellow under the R&D Unit’s Strategic Projects. During her stay at the Molecular Biophysics lab, she was awarded a FCT PhD fellowship (SFRH/BD/108031/2015), which was a unique opportunity to carry out a PhD project on the biophysical characterization of the PM of fungi, combining her two favourite topics. During her PhD project she implemented autonomously the growth and manipulation of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa, after a short visit to Prof. Arnaldo Vieira's lab in Oporto (I3S) and published the first thorough studies on N. crassa PM biophysical properties, highlighting the importance of PM domains in fungal development (BBA - Mol Cell Biol Lipids), and drug response (Front.Physiol.). She also studied the relationship between membrane protein compartments and lipid domains in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, through the use of fluorescence spectroscopy (steady-state and time-resolved) and confocal FLIM (Biomolecules) and determined the antifungal activity of new derivatives of Ketoconazole against yeast strains (Sci.Rep.). Her PhD culminated with a first authorship of an invited review in FEBS Letters entitled “Sphingolipid-enriched domains in fungi”. She also had the opportunity to collaborate in other projects, which resulted in publications in high impact journals such as Redox Biol. She was selected to participate in the FEBS Advanced Practical Course - Microspectroscopy: Functional imaging of biological systems, 2018, The Netherlands and awarded a travel grant from the Youth Travel Fund. She was also awarded a fellowship from EBSA to present a communication at the 59th ICBL (Finland). During her academic career F.Santos has co-authored 12 international peer-reviewed articles and 2 international book chapters totalizing ca. 264 citations and an h-index of 10 (Scopus/Web of Science), 1 peer-reviewed national article, 1 national book chapter, 5 international conference abstracts in indexed journals, 13 oral communications (8 international) and 34 poster communications (16 international).