Joana Couceiro is a PhD student, enrolled in the PhD program in Biotechnology and Biosciences from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon (UL), since 2022. She is funded by an individual PhD scholarship from the highly competitive MIT Portugal program, and her dissertation focuses on the sustainable production of secondary metabolites from bacterial symbionts of octocorals. In the scope of her PhD, Joana described two novel marine bacterial species in the genus Aquimarina, A. aquimarini sp. nov. and A. spinulae sp. nov., published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM). She also wrote a book chapter on bioactive natural products and biotechnological applications of the coral microbiome for the Springer book titled 'Coral Reef Microbiome', currently in press. Joana has also developed experimental work where she applies metabolomics and transcriptomics to test if co-cultures of sympatric marine bacteria enhances secondary metabolite production in the peptide antibiotic producing bacterium Aquimarina aquimarini, and a manuscript is currently in preparation. In her current experimental work, Joana is establishing a culture collection of bacteria associated with the temperate octocoral Leptogorgia sarmentosa. The collection encompasses ca. 400 isolates from three different oxygen conditions (aerobic, microaerophilic and anaerobic) which will later be tested for their antimicrobial and antifouling capacities. The prokaryotic diversity hosted by this octocoral will further be explored employing 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Joana obtained her Integrated Master's degree in Biological Engineering from IST-UL in January 2021. Her Master thesis at the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (iBB/IST) focused on the diversity and structure of bacterioplankton communities in ice and water samples from the Subarctic, using metagenomics tools, and was rated excellent (18 on a 0-20 scale). Her MSc thesis work contributed to a research article published in the Journal "Science of the Total Environment" and an iPoster presented at the World Microbe Forum (ASM/FEMS). Between her Master and PhD studies, Joana was hired as research assistant on the R&D project SymbioReactor, funded through the FundoAzul program of the Portuguese Ministry of the Sea (DPGM). Here she acquired scientific training in marine genomics, annotating symbiosis-related genes and secondary metabolite biosynthesis gene clusters on the genomes of Roseibium album (Alphaproteobacteria) and Aquimarina megaterium (Flavobacteriia) strains isolated from octocorals. This work was published in two articles in the ASM journal "Microbiology Resource Announcements", both with Joana as first author. During her time as a Bachelor student, in summer 2017, Joana performed an internship in Microbial Biotechnology at the Centro de Biotecnologia Agrícola e Agro-Alimentar do Alentejo, Beja, investigating bacterial tolerance to inhibitors derived from plant biomass hydrolysis. From August 2018 to January 2019, she gained international experience as an Erasmus exchange student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden, taking courses on Drug Development and Microbial Cultivation in Bioreactors. From 2019 to the beginning of 2020, Joana was part of a student team developing a design project which won the 3rd ESBES-BIOT Biotechnical Design Competition, with a project entitled 'Continuous production of lentivirus for use in gene and/or cell therapy products'. So far, Joana has authored/co-authored five research articles and presented her work in over 10 poster and oral presentations in multiple national and international conferences.