Sandra Amaral concluded her PhD in Cell Biology at the University of Coimbra in 2009, focused on the impact of Diabetes on male reproductive function. In 2010, after a short period teaching, she was awarded a highly competitive FCT post-doc fellowship to further study this topic, gaining expertise in sperm function, bioenergetics and spermatogenesis evaluation. In 2013, she secured her first funding. Through this grant, Sandra supervised 1 MSc student and published 4 papers as senior author. These achievements were major milestones, proving her capacity as a scientist and leader. Moreover, she immediately established a fruitful collaboration with the German Center of Reproductive Medicine & Andrology (CeRA), where she is a visiting scientist, reinforced by a cooperation project granted in 2016, when she was also awarded with a 2ndpost doc FCT fellowship to study male infertility, and recently by a SR &TD grant in 2023. In 2018, she got new funding, through a highly competitive grant scheme, that allow her to supervise 3 Msc and 2 PhD students. This new project, devoted to understand sperm (dys)function in male infertility, a topic of great impact as infertility is growing globally and becoming an important social burden, has definitely triggered her career as an independent early-stage scientist. Sandra is now working with the Biology of Reproduction & Stem Cell Group at the host institution, leading the subgroup "Male infertility and gamete quality research team" and supervising 1 MSc and 2 PhD student, with her own funding. She has 40 publications, namely: 2 books, 5 book chapters and 26 papers, including in high ranking journals of the reproductive field, leading to a global h-index of 20 and 2019 citations (google scholar). Also, she presented her work in several meetings : 23 oral and 36 poster, endorsed by 4 awards [Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation(GER), Welcome Burrows Foundation(USA) and European Testis Workshop (ETW)]. In her professional activities, she interacted with 64 collaborator(s) co-authorship of scientific papers and supervised 3 PhD thesis (1 concluded. 1 waiting for defense), 7 MSc dissertation(s), and several work(s) of course completion of LSc/BSc and taugh in the academia. In order to excel herself and acquire the necessary skills to boost her scientific knowledge, Sandra has participated in several advanced courses such as the "Frontiers in Reproduction"(USA) and "Laboratory Animal science- FELASA-cat C". She has also been actively involved in the organization of several meetings of the field, as the ETW, for which she was the leading organizer in 2018 (PT). As a knowledge enthusiast, she has explored other venues and did an entrepreneurship course (IneoStart) to acquire and develop business skills, critical to attract industry funding. Sandra is also actively involved in several outreach activities such as at the scope of Ciência viva programm, the European researchers´night, videos and lectures at schools, just to mention a few. In 2020 (February-july) she as a career break due to maternity leave. Sandra is now at a significant and turning point of her career: so far she gathered a unique expertise on male reproductive function, specifically on fertility-related aspects and developed technical, writing (papers/grants-raising ~300K€), communication and leadership skills, critical to sustain the progression in her scientific career and become a fully independent researcher.