Maria J. S. A. Silva obtained her MSc in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2016 from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon (FFUL). During her Master studies, she joined Dr. Pedro Gois group to work on a Chemical Biology project for site-selective functionalization of N-terminal cysteines, which contributed to her first publication in Chem. Sci. in 2016, with over 90 citations. After that, she did a 3-month internship at Sapienza, Università di Roma (Italy) in Medicinal Chemistry thanks to the Erasmus Programme. The project developed therein was her Master thesis topic under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Di Santo, on the synthesis of a new class of Trypanothione reductase inhibitors to tackle parasitic infections. Later, she pursuit her PhD studies focused on novel site-selective bioconjugation strategies and their application to targeted photodynamic therapy (PDT) in a joint project under the supervision of Dr. Pedro Gois (FFUL, Portugal) and Prof. Dr. Gilles Gasser (Chimie ParisTech, France). The translational research approach experienced in the 7-month stay in Paris from synthesis, purification and cellular in vitro assays, enabled the development of a new set of skills, including multi-tasking in a multidisciplinary fashion. In May 2022, she received her PhD degree in Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical and Therapeutic Chemistry specialty, with the highest grade, distinction and honors at FFUL and received the best PhD thesis in Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Award 2023 by the Portuguese Chemical Society. Thanks to her contributions to the Chemical Biology field with 8 publications in high impact journals and she was nominated as the Portuguese representative in the 11th European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry - Young Medicinal Chemists' Symposium 2024. In October 2022, she joined the group of Prof. Tanja Weil at Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP, Germany) as a postdoctoral researcher to work on the design new protein-based biotherapeutics and study their impact on the survival and progression of targeted cancer cells and effects on the tumor microenvironment. Currently, Maria J. S. A. Silva is senior scientist in the Mass Spectrometry (MS) core facility of MPIP and much involved in the establishment of native MS and tandem-MS analysis with ESI and/or MALDI ionization techniques for the chemical and structural characterization of small to macromolecules. To further broaden her technical and technological skills in advanced MS tools, she has recently participated in the 6th International Mass Spectrometry School and did the Bruker MALDI TOF Essential Operator MALDI Imaging course. Due to her increasing interest towards more complex biological applications, she has been working with cancer cell spheroids as tumor models that better replicate the complex and heterogeneous network between cells and extracellular environment inside tumors. With the help of different imaging techniques, including fluorescence and confocal imaging microscopies, she assesses the cellular uptake and effect on cell invasion and migration of new designed therapeutics, and complement with label free MS imaging techniques to further study different molecular patterns and distribution in the 3D cell models.