Ana Raquel Soares is an Assistant Researcher (CEECIND/00284/2018) and PI of the tRNA epitranscriptome and disease Group (tRED) at iBiMED-UAveiro. She holds a major in Pharmaceutical Sciences, obtained in 2005 at the Faculty of Pharmacy, UCoimbra and completed her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences - Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2011 by the same institution. Currently, she leads a team of 6, including 2 Master students, 3 PhD students, and 1 Post-doc. Past members include 1 Post-doctoral researcher, 1 PhD student, 7 Technicians, 13 Master students and 1 Project Manager. Throughout her scientific path, she published 31 papers in SCI indexed journals and 2 book chapters. During her PhD, she was one of the first to apply next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to uncover novel miRNAs and miRNA expression patterns during vertebrate development, generated miRNA profiles for different stages of cervical cancer and used siRNA technologies to uncover miRNA targets in zebrafish. During that period, she was a visiting researcher at CESAM, UAveiro, IGC - Gulbenkian Science Institute Lisbon, and the GIGA Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences Research Center, ULiege, Belgium. After obtaining the PhD, Ana was awarded a FCT post-doctoral grant at UAveiro to study small non-coding RNAs derived from tRNAs and found that those molecules were able to enter the RNAi pathway and were differentially expressed in infection and in cancer, an indicator of biomarker potential. Ana was also involved in the development of an animal model (zebrafish) of translation errors and found that tRNA mutations that affected translation have a potent impact on proteostasis, promoting gradual cellular degeneration, in animal and cellular models. In 2015, she moved to iBiMED, and focused her research on tRNA epitranscriptome dynamics and how it impacts translation and proteostasis maintenance in physiology and pathology. She is particularly interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms governing tRNA modifications, their relevance for translation control and what drives tRNA modification disruption, and consequently, translation dysfunction and its relevance in the context of aging, age-related diseases and disease susceptibility. The main goal is to uncover if epitranscriptome signatures can constitute disease biomarkers and if epitranscriptome modulation can be used as a therapeutic strategy in diseases where translation dysfunction is a hallmark. In the last years she obtained funding as PI for 5 projects on the topic from different sources, namely FCT, H2020 and Alzheimer's Association, in a total of 1,5M euros. Her team has also found that tRNA modifications regulate tsRNA generation in response to stress. Furthermore, she was involved in studies that show that tRNA anticodon hypomodification induces codon-specific mistranslation and protein aggregation and that tRNA pool changes occur in lung cancer and correlate with malignant behavior, indicating that targeting tRNAs in cancer cells may render cells susceptible to therapy. Her group has also evidence that specific tRNA modifying enzymes can represent sensors of protein aggregation burden in Alzheimer's, and that specific tRNA modifications are essential for protein translation and replication of codon-biased viral genomes (in prep). The tRED group has active collaborations with different groups from national and international institutions, namely Goethe University Frankfurt, Centre dImmunologie Marseille-Luminy, Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, iMED - ULisbon, and UAveiro. Ana is also actively engaged in outreach activities: she coordinates the participation of iBiMED in dissemination activities such as Xperimenta UA, and formed the UAVR-RNA Club, supported by the RNA Society. She represents iBiMED in the PT-OPENScreen consortium, and is currently the Coordinator of the Molecular Medicine laboratory/OpenSpace Facility at iBiMED.