Barbara Horta e Costa has been working in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and their relation to fisheries all her career. She is a marine biologist/ecologist working in marine conservation and management. She is particularly interested in marine ecology and the socio-ecological aspects of marine protection and management. She has been studying MPAs and their effects in marine assemblages but also in local users, such as artisanal fishers. She is very interested in the study of factors influencing MPA effectiveness - the enabling conditions for MPA success (so MPAs are really effective tools). These include MPA design and planning, protection levels, stakeholder engagement, management effectiveness and monitoring. She is very interested in the variety and potential outcomes of partially protected areas, the vast majority of MPAs. She is also very interested in MPAs networks, connectivity, marine biodiversity, marine habitats, species interactions, species behavior, climate change, fisheries vulnerability, and fish assemblages’ resilience to local and global impacts. She is dedicated to particular case-studies, but also to global or regional patterns of MPAs. She did her master thesis in Cuba (assessing potential ecological effects of the Punta Frances MPA), she then did her PhD in Portugal and California (UCSB), assessing socio-ecological effects of the Arrabida MPA as well as climate effects in fish assemblages. She then conducted different postdocs, in Portugal and France. She co-led a work package of a Biodiversa project (with various European collaborators) and was the leading author of a globally recognized regulation-based classification system (RBCS) of MPAs and zones, and the senior leader of a global meta-analysis on protection effects. She also run a diagnosis of Portuguese MPAs. She is collaborating with a variety of projects and studies related to MPAs and conservation (nationally and globally). This includes being co-PI of the MARSW project at CCMAR, aiming at mapping marine biodiversity, monitoring effects of different protection levels and contributing to the management of the marine park of PNSACV and to the monitoring of Portuguese MPAs. She is also part of the group leading the implementation process, through participatory methods, of the first Portuguese MPA of community interest (in mainland Portugal). Globally, she has been invited and is involved on global discussions on post-2020 targets for ocean conservation and on the relevance of informing about protection levels and other MPA indicators (invited by IUCN to several meetings). She is highly involved in the development of the MPA guide (she led the protection levels decision tree) and with the incorporation of the RBCS within the MPA Atlas, Blue parks and other platforms. She has an extensive network within the international MPA community. She is the co-founder of a Portuguese NGO related to ocean conservation and awareness, the Sciaena. She teaches MSc courses related to ocean governance and MPAs and has been supervising numerous students, thesis and internships (>30). She is currently a contracted researcher in the University of Algarve and CCMAR.