Jose Bessa is the group leader of the VDR research group at I3S and IBMC, Oporto, Portugal. The VDR group is constituted by 2Post-docs, 4 PhD students, 2MSc fellows, 1 MSc student and 2 technicians and is recipient of several prestigious grants including an ERC Starting Grant, a La Caixa Grant and FCT Grants. Jose Bessa has concluded his PhD degree in Developmental Biology at ICBAS, University of Porto in 2008. During his PhD, Jose studied the development of drosophila and zebrafish visual systems under the supervision of Dr.F.Casares, publishing several works in top journals: Genes&Development (IF:12,4), two in Development (IF:6,2) and Developmental Dynamics (IF:2,6). As a post-doc, Jose Bessa joined the laboratory of Prof.Gomez-Skarmeta, an expert in zebrafish Functional Genomics. At this point, Jose has decided to adopt the zebrafish as a model organism to pursue my new research interests, now focused on gene transcriptional regulation. He has developed new tools to approach this field of research, among them, new vectors to test the activity of cis-regulatory elements in zebrafish, that were requested from more than 80 labs worldwide, leading to a publication with more than 120 citations. Jose also created a tool to disrupt regulatory landscapes of genes, and leading a team of researchers he generated a large scale screen for regulatory mutations in zebrafish, a work published in Genome Research(IF:14,4; 2014) with him as first and corresponding author. More recently, Jose has developed an interest in gene regulation and function in pancreas, achieving his own competitive funding from the European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes to develop his independent research line. Also, Jose lead and published works in the field of Developmental Biology on the role of sox21a in lateral line patterning, and in the field of Evolutionary Biology correlating differences in enhancer activity and in gene expression during evolution. In 2013, Jose Bessa won a position as Associated Group Leader at IBMC, Porto, Portugal. His current research addresses the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation of genes and how its disruption impacts on pancreas development and disease, with special emphasis on diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Since 2013 Jose Bessa was awarded a FCT - Auxiliary Researcher contract (01/2014) and a FCT - Principal Investigator contract (06/2020). In 2016, after a very positive evaluation by the IBMC External Advisory Board(EAB), Jose Bessa was promoted from Associated to Group Leader at IBMC. In 2017, after a very positive evaluation by the EAB of i3S, a new institute formed by the consortium of 3 other institutes including IBMC, Jose was promoted to Group Leader at i3S. Jose Bessa’s publications from the last 8 years include works within his fields of expertise in top journals such as Nature Cell Biology(IF:20,5), Oncotarget(IF:5,1) and the American Journal of Human Genetics (IF:10,4). In the last 3 years, José Bessa is corresponding author in top scientific journals, as Nature Communications (IF:14,9), Cells (IF:6,6), FEBS Journal (IF:5,5), Diabetes (IF:9,5) and Cell Reports (IF:10,3).