Academic Position: Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisboa (ULisboa), Portugal, holding a joint appointment with the Department of Physics and the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering. Senior researcher at LIP, where she leads the theoretical nuclear/hadron physics group, NPSTRONG. She collaborates with members of IST’s Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering on applications of nuclear radiation and ion beam techniques. She was elected Corresponding Member of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences, appointed Associate Member of the Helmholtz Research Academy Hesse for FAIR/GSI, distinguished on Women's day by Ciência Viva, and nominated by FCT as national repesentative at NuPECC. Scientific Contributions and Supervision: She has coordinated six multi-year scientific projects with competitive funding from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) and served as the national leader for five European networks and one Iberian Scientific Integrated Action. She has supervised 17 master's theses, 5 PhD dissertations, 5 postdoctoral fellowships, and 10 introduction-to-research projects. She is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications and five books, including Nucleus – A Trip to the Heart of Matter (Johns Hopkins University Press), which has been translated into Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, French, Swedish, and Korean. Service to the Scientific Community: She served on several committees, including the Editorial Advisory Board of Europhysics News (2007–2012), the European Research Committee on Few-Body Problems, and the International Light Cone Advisory Committee (ILCAC). She has also held key roles in academic governance, including serving as a member of the Senate of ULisboa and IST's Scientific Council, as President of IST’s Department of Physics (2018–2020), and as President of IST’s Pedagogical Council (2020–2024). She was President of the Portuguese Physical Society (2013–2016) and served two elected terms on the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society (EPS). She is a member of the EPS Physics for Development Working Group and member of the EPS Commission for selection of EPS-recognized conferences and workshops. Research Summary: Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hannover, Germany, she has worked on various topics in theoretical hadronic and nuclear physics, with a particular focus on nuclear interactions. Her research has contributed to understanding the origin of three-nucleon forces, essential for describing nuclear binding and nuclear matter properties and originated from the fundamental Lagrangian of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Another major theme of her work is the role of relativity in nuclear and hadronic interactions and structure. She has also explored the spectroscopy and structure of mesons and baryons as bound states of quarks and gluons, including novel multiquark structures recently discovered, and addressed how mass, charge, and magnetism are distributed among the constituent quarks that form nucleons within atomic nuclei, crucial for understanding photon-nucleon interactions and the rates of photonuclear reactions in stars. Open research questions include the confinement of quarks in hadrons and nuclei, the origin of mass and clustering effects, and the properties of matter under extreme temperature and density conditions—such as those found in heavy-ion collisions in particle accelerators and in cosmic events like neutron star mergers. Her secondary interests are at the interface of nuclear physics, engineering, biology, and medicine, e.g. through applications of radiation and ion beam techniques. Her work employs advanced computational modeling techniques, including non-perturbative functional methods such as Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations, which complement lattice QCD simulations in describing bound systems of quarks and gluons.