Since March 2014 I am working as a post doctorate at the Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), Portugal, in the Laboratory of Environmental Technologies with the following main tasks: (a) combining chemical solvent extraction methods with biological processes for the recovery of metals from industrial wastewaters; (b) optimizing anaerobic and aerobic bioreactors to treat municipal and/or industrial wastewaters with high organic load and industrial wastewaters contaminated with metals; (c) use of analytical techniques to monitor bacterial growth and activity, organic compounds, metals and for the characterization of precipitates resulting from chemical or biological processes, (d) taxonomic studies to characterize bacterial communities from bioreactors and polluted waterbodies, (e) support in the construction and evaluation of bioremediation system at pilot plant scale. Just before starting to work in this laboratory I visited for two months (January and February 2014) the laboratories of the Comparative Molecular Endocrinology research team of CCMAR, doing mainly bioinformatics analyses: (f) construction of phylogenetic trees based on specific DNA and protein sequences and (g) characterizing the genomic environment of specific genes to study the local chromosomic rearrangements occurred during evolution. Before that, I worked for sixteen and half years (between July 1997 and December 2013) in the Laboratory of Genomics and Genetic Improvement (LGGI) at the University of Algarve, Portugal. The first six years in this laboratory, I received grants from research projects, then I had a PhD fellow for three years, having completed the PhD in Biology, specialty Genetics in 2006, and the remaining seven and half years I worked as a post-doctoral researcher, having spent six months of those last years at the Crop Centre, School of Life Sciences (former HRI) at Warwick University, United Kingdom. During these sixteen and half years I worked mainly on: (h) genetic diversity studies, (i) genetic mapping of Single Loci and Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs), (j) constructing a genomic Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) library, (k) chromosome walking to select BAC clones from targeted mapped regions of interest, (l) preparing libraries of genomic DNA fragments to be sequenced by massive DNA sequencing technologies, (m) aligning the obtained sequence reads by de novo assembling and reference mapping, (n) identifying Open reading Frames (ORFs) and selecting candidate genes. I have also experience in aquaculture: in the final stage of the graduation course, I have mounted a system to study the effect of temperature in the larval development of the Japanese shrimp and after that I worked as assistant technician at an aquaculture hatchery producing microalgae, rotifers and artemia, for the larval culture of seabream and seabass. Moreover, I worked for three months in the Laboratory of Civil Engineering of Macau, doing quality tests to construction materials. At present my main interest is to develop and optimize sustainable biological processes to treat contaminated wastewaters while producing freshwater and recovering valuable products. I am interested particularly in the biotreatment/recovery of metals form acid mine drainage and other industrial wastewaters as well as in developing new biotechnological tools to improve bioremediation of contaminants of emerging concern in municipal wastewaters, such as pharmaceuticals massively consumed by humans and used in agriculture, cattle breeding and aquaculture. In this context, I am also interested in the optimization of analytical techniques to monitor the emergent pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals and products of their degradation and in using taxonomic and metagenomic approaches for the characterization of microbial communities and respective dynamics and putative metabolic pathways responsible for the bioremediation processes.