FERNANDA PRATAS has been an independent researcher in linguistics for the past seventeen years, after a decade of theoretical training, nationally and in the United States. Her monograph on The Expression of Temporal Meaning in Caboverdean (2021, TiLSM series by De Gruyter) assembles a wide array of new data from Caboverdean, a non-standardized and still understudied language, and her recent analyses on variation and change, aiming at a crosslinguistic perspective and at extensions to other fields. These proposals have been achieved through periods of fieldwork in Cabo Verde and in New England, plus autonomous study and discussions with her peers at different venues. Her Events and Subevents in Caboverdean, funded in 2010, was the first FCT project entirely devoted to research on this Portuguese-related language, with a successful execution both scientifically and financially. She submitted that application while on a post-doc scholarship to study the acquisition of Caboverdean morphosyntax, but this new venture aimed at making accessible to the lay public the oral data she had been registering for her own studies. In 2016 she became the PI in a another project dedicated to Caboverdean (LUDViC-Language Unity and Diversity in Caboverdean), and another one in 2021 (Andante-Human concepts of time, a view from natural language), both also funded by FCT after competitive international calls. The oral corpus LUDViC assembles her collection or oral data: http://teitok.clul.ul.pt/ludvic/ Her academic and scientific self-determination is visible in her international talks, publications, and partnerships, and mainly in the independence of her views, which are now interdisciplinary in nature. Both these personal projects and a different post-doc scholarship, in the ERC funded Post Scriptum (P.S.) (2012-2016), have contributed to the development of her skills in the digital humanities area. EARLIER ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Before completing her PhD, her theoretical training in linguistics included one semester and a further period of two months as a visiting student at the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, in 2003 and 2004, and a Linguistic Society of America Summer School, in 2005, with an A rating in all the 4 seminars she enrolled in. In 2004, she had established herself internationally as one of the first linguists doing formal analyses of Caboverdean morphosyntax, and was thus invited by the Journal of Linguistics to write the review of the book by Marlyse Baptista, where she challenged the author's claims on null subjects and verb movement. In 2008 she spent two months as a visiting scholar at the UCLA department of linguistics and was invited to collaborate in the chapter Language in Society for the ninth edition of the text book An Introduction to Language (2009), by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams. MERGING IDEAS OVER TIME. After her first graduation (1985), in journalism, she spent 15 years as a full-time investigative journalist in leading Portuguese publications (O Seculo, Marie Claire, Grande Reportagem, Icon, Público, Diário de Notícias) and 2 as editor-in-chief, which first made her discover and mature significant leadership qualities. While still working as a journalist, she completed a second BA (1990) and, in 2001, started an MA in linguistics. For a while after that she kept regular contributions to periodicals, one of which consisted of weekly essays on the biographies of personalities from diverse professional areas. These were later collected in four volumes: À Beira do Abismo (2005), Beleza Interior (2006), A Vida das Palavras (2007), Viajantes Solitários (2008). So the same old attraction to the study of time which made her then choose, among others, the lives of physicists and philosophers such as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and William James, has later, somewhat by chance, stumbled upon a language which offers still entirely unmapped challenges in the domain of temporal expression.