Rita Teresa Teixeira published 22 papers in peer-review journals. I¿m a permanent review to journals like Plants, Biomolecules and Plant Direct and frequently invited by New Phytologist amongst others as reviewer. I¿ve been invited twice as guest editor for Plants for the special issues; Light Signaling in Plants and Regulation of Cork Differentiation in Plants. The experience in cell biology, imaging, molecular biology and genetics gathered throughout my career allows me to have a wider view and capacity to interconnect different aspects of a developmental project such as the one I am presently involved in at BioISI. Currently, I am a Research Assistant in the Department of Plant Biology, University of Lisbon. Broadly, my research focus is plant biotechnology, genetics, and development. My current project, Functional studies of plant membrane trafficking and secretion - the phosphoinositide pathway in the responses to abiotic stress, examines plant membrane trafficking secretion, a process that remains little understood despite its importance to cell membrane expansion, which is largely responsible for plant yield. Included in this project, I¿m co-supervising an ongoing PhD student program (Dario Marchese). From 2015 till 2018, I held a Research Assistant position at the Department of Forestry Resources and Environmental Conservation (FREC) at Virginia Tech. The project examined the genetic network controlling the growth cessation on Populus under two abiotic stress conditions; short days and nutrient deprivation. For that, I obtained different RNA libraries (mRNA, miRNA and mRNA from laser microdissected cambium cells) to generate a time-series transcriptomic data necessary to build a regulatory network controlling tree growth in response to nutrient availability and daylength. Previously, as Research Associate at the Superior Institute of Agronomy (ISA), University of Lisbon, Portugal I performed as PI on the project; Genetic Approach to Cork Quality Development in Quercus suber as result of abiotic stress response. I established a comparative analysis of good and bad quality cork at the transcriptional level using, as biological samples, the phellogen, a secondary meristem that gives rise to cork. Phellogen cells were scraped from fresh debarked planks and isolated by laser microdissection. The resulting cDNA libraries were then deep sequenced. A thorough anatomic and ultrastructural analysis was performed in stems and roots to elucidate how cork cells developed from meristematic cells. I carried out my first postdoc at University of California, Davis, making use of trans-activation systems (pOp::LhG4) and enhanced trap lines, I studied the role of the gene family class III HD-Zip and KANADI on secondary growth development. I took this project with me to Portugal to the University of Coimbra. A proceeding was published in Journal of Biotechnology (2010) and two master students got their thesis. This developmental line of investigation was a change from my PhD project (2005) that involved the analysis of abnormal formation of carpelloid floral male organs displayed by flowers of Brassica napus cytoplasmic male sterile plants and where I performed a comprehensive genetic analysis using various molecular biology approaches together with thorough phenotyping and anatomic studies.