Vasco M. Barreto (VMB) is an assistant professor at FCT (Universidade Nova), a group leader at FCT (2 master students, 2 junior students), and the director a company (Genetagus) currently composed of 3 postdocs and 1 technician. He has independently secured 8 external competitive grants and fellowships for his team, totaling ~1.2 M, and authored a total of 56 publications, including 30 international ones, with 24 peer-reviewed articles (with more than 2 000 citations, according to Google Scholar) in some of the very top journals in the life sciences (e.g., Nature Commun, Mol Cell, JEM, Nature Immunol, PLoS Pathog, PNAS, Cell), 13 of which as first or corresponding author. His research articles have been highlighted in Nature Immunol, Faculty of 1000, and JEM. As off March 2024, he as more than 2000 citations (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xvgADskAAAAJ&hl=pt-PT ). VMB graduated in Biology at the Univ. of Lisbon (1994) and did his doctoral studies at the Inst. Pasteur in Paris, obtaining a Ph.D. degree in Immunology from the UPMC (2001). He then moved to The Rockefeller Univ. in New York, first as a Postdoc and then as a Research Associate, where he worked in the molecular mechanisms of antibody formation. He returned to Portugal in 2008 to launch his group at the IGC and address 2 hallmarks of B cells: 1) the interplay between the mechanisms that promote genetic diversity in somatic cells and DNA repair; 2) the epigenetics of mono-allelic expression. He was awarded a Ciencia 2008 contract to initiate his independent career at the IGC and then an Associate Researcher position (IF 2015), after which he moved to CEDOC (FCM, Universidade Nova), where from 2016 to 2022 he developed research work supported by 3 FCT grants. This has allowed him to make key contributions to the understanding of both the regulation of Activation-Induced Deaminase (AID), the editor of immunoglobulin genes, and the process of V(D)J recombination. VMB filed a provisional patent and supervised 6 postdocs, 4 PhD students (4 graduated) and 6 MSc students (4 graduated). He has reviewed for the FCT and major journals (e.g. Cell, J Exp Med, Nat Methods, Infect Genet and Evol, Nucleic Acids Res), was the main opponent in 6 national and 1 international Ph.D. theses, delivered invited talks at national meetings/institutions as well as abroad (Spain, Sweden, Israel) and (co-)organized modules of 4 international PhD programs as well as 2 national and 1 international scientific meetings. VMB has collaborated with world experts in his field (e.g., A Gimelbrant, Harvard Medical School, USA; A Ramiro, CNIC, Spain), was appointed to the Selection Committee of the International Plants for Life PhD Program (2016), and the Editorial Boards of SpringerPlus (2015), Developmental Epigenetics (2022), and Microbes & Immunity (2023). He has pioneered modern genetics techniques in Portugal, from transgenic mice to CRISPR/Cas editing of cell lines, and he was the head of a gene editing service he started, from which Genetagus emerged, which has delivered genetically edited cells to top research institutions from Europe and the US. He is currently working on a commissioned book on Genetics and he is the cofounder and co-director of Almanaque, an online magazine of ideas.