I, Ricardo Bastos-Gonçalves, am a research fellow at the School of Medicine of University of Minho. I graduated in Applied Biology in 2020 at the School of Sciences of the same university. As a bachelor's final project, I developed a monograph in which I reviewed the literature on cancer cell's metabolism and the potential of membrane monocarboxylic acids transporters as targets to develop new treatments for cancer. Afterwards, I enrolled in the Master's program in Health Sciences and developed my dissertation project entitled "Investigating the neuronal ensembles encoding valence in the Laterodorsal Tegmentum", under supervision of Bárbara Coimbra, PhD and Ana João Rodrigues, PhD. The project focused on understanding how/if the Laterodorsal Tegmentum (LDT), a small pontine nucleus, contributes to the perception of an external stimulus as positive (rewarding) or negative (aversive), i.e valence assigning, thus contributing to motivated behaviors. I have learned biomolecular techniques such as PCR and immunofluorescence, anatomically-detailed cell quantification , mice stereotaxic surgery and rodent behavioral procedures (exposition to rewarding or aversive stimuli, conditioned and real-time place preference employing optogenetic manipulation and fibre photometry). During the master program I had also the opportunity to attend training sessions of regular and confocal fluorescence microscopy. I am credited by the national authority DGAV to work with laboratory rodents.