Maria João Arez completed her Bachelor in Biology at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa in 2016. She then moved to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa and completed her MSc in Molecular Genetics and Biomedicine in 2018. She performed her thesis year at Instituto de Medicina Molecular | João Lobo Antunes (iMM|JLA) working on DNA methylation and genomic imprinting and then she was awarded a master fellowship to work as a research technician and to continue her research project. During this time she participated in one international meeting with a poster presentation, in an EMBL Course in Heidelberg and in a submitted publication as an author. She also acquired the Laboratory animal course as well as the scientific writing course certificates. At 2020 she performed an internship at Prof. Simon Hippenmeyer Lab at Institute of Science and Technology in Austria (IST Austria) for four months where she established in vitro model of cortical neurons from Cdkn1c conditional knockout mouse embryonic stem cell. At 2021 she came back to her previous project from which resulted big findings leading to her first author publication that is now under revision in Nature Communications. She has now started her PhD in Bioengineering, specialty of cellular therapy and regenerative medicine at iBB, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST Lisboa) to work on the generation of human iPSCs free of epigenetic defects.