Cristina Barrias is Principal Investigator and Group Leader at Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde/ Instituto de Engenharia Biomédica (i3S/INEB, University of Porto), and invited Associate Professor at Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar (ICBAS, University of Porto) and at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP, Polytechnic of Porto). Currently, she is also a member of the Board of Directors of INEB and a member of the Council of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB). Her group at i3S (www.i3s.up.pt) focuses on (micro)tissue engineering for regenerative therapies and in vitro disease modeling. She has been working on the design of customized hydrogel 3D matrices and biofabrication tools to direct cellular self-organization into different types of micro-sized building blocks for bottom-up tissue engineering. These microsystems recapitulate complex tissue morphogenesis processes and are being used to investigate the dynamics of cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in 3D, in pathophysiological contexts, and to decipher key biochemical and biomechanical regulators of cell response. Currently, this knowledge is being translated into the design of advanced 3D in vitro models and of improved therapies for tissue (re)vascularization.