Full Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. Scientific coordinator of the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon. Director of the Lisbon Baby Lab. Executive Director of the Mind-Brain College. Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association. Member of the Permanent Advisory Committee of the ISCA SProSIG. Editor-in-chief of Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. My research focuses on early speech perception and language development, and on prosody in language. In my work, I seek to understand the properties of prosodic systems across and within languages, and how they are acquired by infants. A major challenge is understanding how and to what extent prosody functions as an entry point into language for the young learner, both in typical development and in clinical populations, and how language-particular prosody might modulate the language development paths. Originally trained as a linguist working on the phonetics-phonology-syntax interfaces, my post-doctoral research led me to psycholinguistics, psychology and neuroscience. My research is strongly rooted in multidisciplinary collaborations, and in partnerships with health, education and parent institutions. I have been awarded 11 grants as PI, Co-PI or team leader of projects on typical and atypical language acquisition, and/or on prosody, and contributed to European Networks. In 2010, I set up the Lisbon Baby Lab (the first in Portugal), and have been directing it since. The work produced lead to publications in journals in language and cognitive development, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, psychology, language disorders, clinical linguistics, and phonetics and phonology (e.g., Infancy, Journal of Child Language, Applied Psycholinguistics, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Neuroscience, International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Language and Speech), as well as in major book publishers like Oxford University Press, Mouton De Gruyter, and Springer. I am actively engaged in young researchers advanced training, having supervised 10 post-doctoral projects, 8 PhD students, 13 MA students, and 14 undergraduate research projects (21 with grants awarded by competitive funding). I have been chair of international conferences, such as 16th Conference on Laboratory Phonology - Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology (2018), Speech Prosody 2022 - Getting the prosody right: Acquisition, Impairment, Interventions, and Beyond, and WILD 2024 - Workshop on Infant Language Development. In my lab, we have a strong commitment to collaborative team work, translational research, and public communication of science. I highlight the continued collaborations with nursery schools, the Lisbon Paediatric Hospital and the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, and the many actions to promote evidence-based social awareness. I’m currently leading an interdisciplinary project on multisensory constraints on language acquisition, exploring novel methods to link early speech perception and production. This is a recent example of my overarching goal to foster innovation and attract talent, nurturing future generations of researchers. I actively support Open Science and Open Access, having been a speaker at the Dutch EU Presidency Conference on Open Science (2016), and being a board member of LingOA-Linguistics in Open Access. I have been awarded the ULisboa/CGD scientific award for Language Sciences in 2016 and 2021, the Maria Teresa Palha 2022 Award in the Research, Health and Society domains (for my work towards the knowledge on the early neurodevelopment of language in trisomy 21), and ranked the Best Linguistics and Literature scientist in Portugal, and top 4% in Europe and the World (AD Scientific Index 2024, retrieved 26/12/2023); published with over 70 researchers; 8169 citations (retrieved from Google Scholar, 07/10/2024).