Joana Pereira Marques graduated in Biology (2010) and did a Master's Degree in Applied Microbiology (2013) at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. In 2015, she was awarded a doctoral grant from FCT within the scope of the highly competitive BiotechHealth Doctoral Programme (ICBAS-UP). Under the supervision of Prof. Ceu Figueiredo, Joana focused on the implementation of molecular approaches based on next-generation sequencing to characterize the gastric microbiome, specifically in the context of gastric carcinogenesis. During her PhD, she joined the international molecular diagnostics company, DDL Diagnostic Laboratory (The Netherlands), where she performed whole metagenome sequencing experiments and bioinformatics data analysis to study the gastric microbiome, under the supervision of Dr. Leen-Jan van Doorn. After finishing her PhD, Joana was selected as Junior Researcher within the scope of an FCT-funded project (PTDC/MED-OUT/32532/2017), in which she successfully implemented a metatranscriptomics strategy for profiling the gastric cancer microbiome. Currently, she holds a Junior Researcher position within a European-funded project (AIDA, Grant No: 101095359) that aims to create an Artificial Intelligence diagnostic assistant to help detect precursor lesions of gastric cancer. 
As a result of her scientific activities, Joana has a total of 13 peer-reviewed publications with over 560 citations, including 9 articles, 1 book chapter, and 3 published abstracts (7 as first author). The great majority were published in Q1 journals and one paper was published in a top 5% journal in the area of Gastroenterology (Gut, IF:17.943). Joana also presented her work at several international and national meetings. She has been invited as reviewer for several journals in the field, including Microbiome, Gut Microbes, and International Journal of Cancer. Joana co-supervised 2 BSc dissertations and has been actively mentoring the lab activities of PhD, MSc students and early research fellows. Importantly, she has been team member of 8 research projects funded by national (FCT) and international agencies (European Commission and Worldwide Cancer Research). Alongside her research work, Joana pursued training in scientific and transferable skills by enrolling in several courses and workshops. Moreover, she has integrated the organizing/scientific committees of scientific meetings and has been involved in outreach initiatives for science dissemination.