Ana Catarina Monteiro Pacheco concluded her BSc degree in Biology in 2021 at the Faculty of Sciences (University of Porto), where she performed an internship in the Glial Cell Biology Group at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health (i3S). Under the supervision of Dr. Camila Portugal, Dr. João Relvas and Dr. Evelyn Santos, she studied the beneficial effect of overexpressing the vitamin C transporter (SVCT2) in microglia to improve learning and memory deficits in Parkinson’s disease (PD). She continued for another two years at Dr. João Relvas’s laboratory for her MSc in Neurobiology, at the Faculty of Medicine (University of Porto). During that time, she obtained her animal experimentation license and performed two courses. Additionally, she received two research fellowship at the laboratory to understand the impact of SVCT2 overexpression in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Given this, she continued her previous PD project alongside her AD work, combining both in her MSc thesis. As her interests lay beyond the laboratorial work, she enjoys science communication, leading her to present her work in 10 conferences, 4 of them in the form of oral communication. Furthermore, she integrated the Mentoring Program at University of Porto, as a student mentor of two students and participated in roundtables and the Brain Awareness Week providing talks and activities to undergraduate students. As a leader, she was appointed as student representative of the master students in Neurobiology, integrating the Course Monitoring Committee during her MSc. Her group findings in AD lead to an abstract publication in the Journal of Neurochemistry and a Pre-print in 2024 entitled “Increasing the vitamin C transporter SVCT2 in microglia improves synaptic plasticity and restrains memory impairments in Alzheimer’s disease models”. She performed several workshops and participated in numerous congresses focused of Neuroscience and glia, all to improve her knowledge and expertise in the field. For two consecutive years, Catarina was honored with the first prize in the Neuroscience Parallel Oral Session and the First Prize in The Plenary Session with her work on PD in 2022 and AD in 2023. Since January 2024, she became a visiting researcher at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS, University of Minho). Catarina now focuses on understanding the relevance of serotonergic projections and serotonin release modulation in the PFC to revert cognitive inflexibility in stress-related disorders, where she maintains glial cells as part of her research study.