S. Silva is a microbiologist with an MSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the Faculdade de Ciências Universidade de Lisboa (2008). As an undergraduate she conducted research work at Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge (Portugal) with Dra. Mafalda Bourbon studying Familial Hypercholesterolaemia, and in 2006 she was awarded a Gulbenkian short-term fellowship to work with Prof. Anne Soutar at the MRC-CSC Imperial College London (UK). 
In 2008 she was selected for the prestigious internship program InoVContacto, run by the Portuguese Government to work as an R&D scientist in a biotech company in Denmark.
 

She obtained her PhD degree at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Lisby. During her PhD studies she became a highly skilled cell biologist, studying DNA repair and genomic instability, particularly the effect of SUMOylation in the spatiotemporal regulation of DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair and telomere maintenance.
In 2016 she moved to Seville (Spain) to join Prof. Andrés Aguilera at CABIMER for her postdoctoral studies and worked on the role of R-loops and transcription-replication conflicts in genomic instability and their implication in DNA damage response. During her scientific career as a molecular and cell biologist, she has strived to produce high quality results and published in several impacting articles in the field of DNA damage and genomic instability as first and co-author.
 

In 2022 she retured to Portugal and joined Prof. Helder Maiato’s lab at i3S, where she continues to develop her research in the molecular mechanisms associated with chromosomal and genomic instability in cancer, with a particular focus on breast cancer and translational research.