Catarina Xavier has completed her Biology degree at the University of Porto (Portugal) and Umeå University (Sweden) in 2010 and pursued her master degree in Forensic Genetics at the same Portuguese University/IPATIMUP in 2012. Afterwards she undertook her PhD studies in Medical Sciences (Genetics and Genomics program) at the Medical University of Innsbruck under the supervision of Prof. Walther Parson. Her PhD englobed various projects of forensic and population genetics, focusing mostly in mitochondrial DNA analysis.

From 2017 to 2021 she has worked as a full-time postdoc researcher at the Institute of Legal Medicine Innsbruck, taking part of the European Horizon 2020 project VISAGE (VISible Attributes through GEnomics). The main goal was to broaden the usage of DNA phenotyping tools by developing new assays and statistical framework for biogeographical ancestry and phenotypic inference (using SNPs and micro-haplotypes) and age prediction (methylation quantitative analysis).

In 2022 she has joined the UniGENe and the Population Genetics and Evolution groups at I3S (Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde) as a junior researcher. The main focus was the correlational analysis of electroencephalogram data and whole genome bisulfite sequencing data in migraine patients.

From 2023 she has started a new project in the Population Genetics and Evolution group. MultiAD is a FCT funded project supervised by Nádia Pinto (PhD) that foresees the study of sporadic Alzheimer's disease subtypes with a multimodal study combining genomic and electroencephalogram data.