Maria João Freitas is a linguist and a researcher at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. She is currently Associate Professor (with the academic title of Aggregate (Agregação)) at the Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras (FLUL). She holds an MA in Portuguese Phonetics and Phonology (1990), focusing on speech temporal structure, a PhD in Phonological Acquisition (1998), focusing on the acquisition of syllable structure by Portuguese children, and an Aggregation in Portuguese Linguistics (2013). She is (co-)author of book chapters and articles in Portuguese and international journals, and has organized books for scientific dissemination in the fields of language acquisition and phonology. In collaboration with colleagues from different universities and with former MA and PhD students, she is developing research on the following topics: (i) the nature of child phonological representations; (ii) the role of the phonological constituency in describing typical and atypical development, thus building bridges with the field of Clinical Linguistics; (iii) the relationship between phonological knowledge and the development of metalinguistic skills, thus building bridges with the field of Educational Linguistics. She has been responsible for and a member of several research projects. In recent years she has collaborated with two international projects: the PhonBank Project (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; Carnegie Mellon, USA); the Crosslinguistic Child Phonology Project (University of British Columbia, Canada). Her teaching experience includes courses and seminars in the fields of phonology, language acquisition and speech comprehension and production. She has (co)supervised several post-doctoral, doctoral and master projects in her research fields. She is Director of the PhD programme in Linguistics since 2013 and member of the Scientific Conseil at FLUL. Her research interests include phonology, language acquisition, clinical linguistics, and educational linguistics.