Rita Azevedo graduated in Biochemistry by the Instituto Universitário de Ciências (formerly known as Instituto Superior de Ciências da Saúde - Norte) of CESPU group in 2012, with specialization in genetic predictors of therapeutic outcome in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This theme was chosen because patients’ clinicopathological variables, as also as genetic polymorphisms in genes encoding for proteins involved in the action mechanism of methotrexate (MTX), the standard drug for RA treatment, have been described as contributors to therapeutic outcome variability among the patients. Her participation set a roadmap for the improvement of the prediction of RA patients’ outcome to MTX treatment through the translational role of genetic polymorphisms into clinical practice, sustaining a breakthrough in the field of Personalized Medicine. Specifically, she participated in the demonstration of the combined influence of twenty clinicopathological variables and twenty-eight genetic polymorphisms, in thirteen genes encoding for proteins involved in MTX action mechanism, as potential predictors of clinical response to MTX and/or MTX-related toxicity occurrence in Portuguese RA patients. She completed an MSc in Medical Informatics in 2014 by the Faculty of Medicine of University of Porto, with a dissertation about mobile health (mHealth) for RA self-management. The study suggested the usefulness and patients’ willingness to use and pay for a RA self-management smartphone application and provided insights on patients’ needs. Overall, the smartphone application had potential to be an innovative medium to endow patients to develop self-management skills. Overall, her work was the first in this area and sustained a breakthrough in the field of mHealth for RA self-management. In 2014 she started the PhD degree in Pathology and Molecular Genetics from the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute of University of Porto aimed to develop novel therapeutic strategies based on glycoproteins in bladder cancer, with funding from a grant of the Foundation for the Science and Technology (FCT) (SFRH/BD/105355/2014). She also joined to the Experimental Pathology and Therapeutics Group of the Portuguese Institute of Oncology - Porto (IPO-Porto), the host institution where the PhD work has been developed. Her thesis has set a roadmap for glycobiomarker discovery in bladder cancer, exploring the full potential of bioinformatics and state-of-the-art high throughput glycomics and glycoproteomics. It has identified CD44 with potential for liquid biopsies, MUC16-sialyl-Tn (MUC16-STn) glycoforms as biomarkers of decreased response to chemotherapy and GLUT1, HOMER3 and also MUC16 carrying short-chain O-glycans as potentially targetable glycobiomarkers in bladder cancer, setting the structural basis for targeted therapeutics. Moreover, it has set the foundations for glycoepitopes synthesis and purification, providing the necessary structural and clinical rationale for supporting the development of novel glycan-based theragnostics applications (detection, therapy). This was the first study in bladder cancer to: 1) construct an in silico bioinformatics protocol for the discovery of glycobiomarkers in cancer; 2) do complete O-glycome analysis on tumour cell lines; 3) contribute to literature about MUC16 overexpression on bladder cancer; 4) demonstrate that only MUC16-STn tumors have association with chemoresistance; 5) construct a target score for defining potentiality of glycoproteins as glycobiomarkers; 6) study HOMER3 in the context of glycosylation and bladder cancer; 7) use magnetic nanosystems for capturing urine glycoproteins from bladder cancer patients; and, 8) was the first to use formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) for glycoproteins study. Overall, with only 28 years old she already has 22 publications in peer-reviewed international journals (10 publications as first author, cumulative impact factor: 86; citations: 366; H-index: 13, i10-index: 14)