Helena has recently been appointed ERA Chair in Molecular Bioengineering at i3S where she is leading the Molecular Biomaterials Group. Before, she was a Reader in Biomedical Engineering & Biomaterials at the School of Engineering & Materials Science in Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) where she took different roles and responsibilities. She was the Programme Director of the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Biomedical Engineering (2016-2022) and was the Director of Operations of the Institute of Bioengineering at QMUL (2015-2017).

Outside academia, she acted as Associate Editor of the Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (Wiley) from 2018 to 2021 and has been a Member of the Advisory Board of the RSC journal Molecular Systems Design & Engineering since 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) since 2017, and was appointed Member of the Materials Chemistry Division Council (RSC) in 2021. In 2021 she also became Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal Peptide Science (Wiley).

Her work focuses on self-assembling biomaterial platforms for cell culture, drug delivery, regenerative medicine, and biosensing. She is author of >100 publications, including papers in Science, Nat Chem, Nat Comm, Adv Funct Mater, Nano Lett, Adv Health Mater, and has edited 3 books on natural-based biomaterials, self-assembling biomaterials and soft matter for biomedical applications.