Ana Margarida Fortes is currently Associate Professor at FCUL and leader of Fruit Functional Genomics & Biotechnology group (https://ffgb.pt/,PFG, BIOISI). The lab currently integrates one post-doc researcher, 1 PhD student, 2 Master researchers and 3 Master students. Up to know she supervised 2 ESRs, 5 postdocs, 3 PhD students, several Master students. She published 59 articles, five book chapters and high volume of Omics data in databases (GenBank/ EMBL / DDBJ/SRA). H-index 29 (Google Scholar) and h-index 24 (Scopus). Her research interests have been focused on fruit ripening and defense. She has been studying fruit ripening and fruit defense responses when challenged with devastating fungal pathogens. The major goals of her research are the establishment of putative models of fruit ripening and fruit- pathogen interaction based on omics data to be further validated by functional analysis in particular gene editing. She got financial support as PI from 4 INTERNATIONAL (ERA-NET, H2020-MSCA-RISE, H2020PRIMA, Bilateral with Germany) and 5 NATIONAL (FCT, FCUL, BIOISI) projects on grapevine. Two international and one national are still undergoing . She made/ is part of the MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE of five Cost Actions. She was the GRANT AWARD COORDINATOR (STSM, ITC, VMG, dissemination grants) of COST CA17111 - Data integration to maximise the power of omics for grapevine (2018-2022). She made part of the Scientific Committee (SC) of several meetings, including the 3rd ISHS International Humulus Symposium (2012), the 10th, 11th, 12th Intl Symposium on Grapevine Physiology and Biotechnology (2016, 2021, 2024) and the International Symposium on Grapevine Breeding and Genetics (2022). She was/ is the Co-PI (four) and/or participant (fourteen, PI in the institution in 9) of several other national projects . She has been reviewing manuscripts for major plant journals (Plant Cell, Plant Physiology, JXB) and science foundations (e.g. American NSF, German DGF, French ANR, and COST as expert/ rapporteur). She has been publishing in prestigious journals (Top 5% Scimago in Plant Sciences) such as Plant Physiology, Journal of Experimental Botany and Horticulture Research (5-year Impact Factors in the year of publication of 9.115, 8.331 and 9.0, respectively). She is since 2017 the SUPERVISING EDITOR of Plant Direct (Wiley, American Society of Plant Biologists and The Society for Experimental Botany). She has performed / is performing editorial activities for other six Plant Journals. In 2016, her group received the first Innovation Prize from CNOIV (https://www.ivv.gov.pt/np4/8111.html) with the work "Transcriptome and metabolome reprogrammig in Vitis vinifera cv. Trincadeira berries upon infection with Botrytis cinerea" published in the top-ranking journal Journal of Experimental Botany. In 2021 she was invited to join the group of viticulture specialists of CNOIV. Another paper (on Omics and grapevine) published in JXB in 2021 was awarded as the EDITOR´S CHOICE of Volume 72, Issue 18. In 2021, 2022 and 2023 she was recognized as the semester professor by Biology Students (Branch Cell Biology and Biotechnology) as professor of Introduction to Plant Biotechnology or Complementary Cell Biology. In January 2022 she was Invited Professor for two weeks at BOKU ( Vienna) and taught at the International Master program of Viticulture, Enology and Wine business. She also co-coordinates the Master in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (FCUL). She was interviewed by the Portuguese Center for Biotechnology Information regarding her work on gene editing in tomato (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtmUnot35OI&ab_channel=cibgabcomunicacao). In 2022 she became member of this center actively promoting the use of NGTs for plant improvement. Ana M Fortes is working, at the invitation of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, on the revision of the Portuguese Language dictionary (section Synthetic Biology of Biological Sciences).