Francisca Gaspar Vieira is a ELLIS PhD student at Heidelberg University, advised by Dr. Britta Velten (Centre for Organismal Studies, Heidelberg University) and co-advised by Dr. Julio Saez-Rodriguez (EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute). Francisca is a fellow member of the PhD program of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and of the Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences (HGS MathComp), where she is developing statistical methods and computational tools for the inference and comparison of perturbation responses from single-cell CRISPR screens across different biological contexts with a particular focus on time course data. Francisca holds an Integrated Master’s degree in Biological Engineering and a second Master's degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. In her first master’s thesis, she spent six months in the Laboratory of Gene Technology in KU Leuven investigating bacteriophage genomics and biocontrol, while during the second master’s thesis she explored multi-omics integration and classification of glioma types. Francisca was also a researcher at NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon, where she aimed to identify the biomolecular mechanisms and processes driving human disease, discover new therapeutic targets, perform patient stratification, predict patient outcomes and optimize early detection, by studying and developing cutting-edge machine learning and statistical tools.