Rita Barros is a post-doctoral fellow at IPATIMUP since 2011, working in a collaborative project with the Amsterdam Medical Center, The Netherlands, on animal models of gastric pre-neoplastic lesions and molecular markers of gastric cancer patient?s prognosis. Rita graduated in Biochemistry at the University of Porto, in 2005, having been awarded the ?Fundação Eng. António de Almeida? prize for top students. In 2010, Rita received her PhD degree, with research work at IPATIMUP and INSERM U682, Strasbourg, France, publishing 6 scientific papers as first author on regulation networks involved in aberrant differentiation programs. During her PhD she also taught Biochemistry as a free assistant in the Medical Faculty of the University of Porto. Following her PhD, Rita spent 6 months as a visiting post-doc at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, working on hair follicle differentiation and regeneration. She currently has active collaboration projects with several groups, namely in Portugal (CIIMAR, ISPUP, CHSJ and IPO-Lisbon), in France (INSERM U682 Strasbourg) and in The Netherlands (AMC, Amsterdam). She has published a total of 21 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, with over 180 citations, and an h-index of 8.