Ana Margarida Fortes holds a PhD in Plant Biotechnology (2003, FCUL). She is currently an Assistant Professor in FCUL and leader of Fruit Functional Genomics & Biotechnology group (FFGB, PFG, BIOISI). The lab currently integrates two post-docs, 3 PhD students and 3 Master students. Ana Margarida Fortes has published 55 articles, five book chapters and high volume of Omics data in databases (GenBank/ EMBL / DDBJ/SRA). H-index 27 (Google Scholar) and h-index 24 (Scopus). Her research interests have been focused on fruit ripening and defense. She has been studying tomato and grape ripening and grapevine defense responses when challenged with devastating fungal pathogens. The major goals of her research are the establishment of putative models of fruit ripening and fruit- pathogen interaction based on omics data to be further validated by functional analysis in particular gene editing. She got financial support as PI from 3 International (ERA-NET, H2020-MSCA-RISE, H2020PRIMA) and 4 National (FCT, FCUL) projects on grapevine. Two international and one national are still undergoing and/or have been recently approved. She made part of the Management Committee of four Cost Actions. She was the Grant Award Coordinator (STSM, ITC, VMG, dissemination grants) of COST CA17111 – Data integration to maximise the power of omics for grapevine (2018-2022). She made part of the Scientific Committee (SC) of several meetings, including the 3rd ISHS International Humulus Symposium (2012), the 10th and 11th Intl Symposium on Grapevine Physiology and Biotechnology (2016, 2021) and the International Symposium on Grapevine Breeding and Genetics (2022). She was/is the Co-PI (four) and/or participant (eleven) of several other national projects on grapevine, hop and corkoak. She has been reviewing manuscripts for major plant journals (Plant Cell, Plant Physiology, JXB) and science foundations (e.g. American NSF, German DGF, French ANR, and COST as expert/ rapporteur). She is since 2017 the Supervising editor of Plant Direct (Wiley, American Society of Plant Biologists and The Society for Experimental Botany). She has performed / is performing editorial activities for other four Plant Journals. In 2016, her group received the first Innovation Prize from CNOIV with the work “Transcriptome and metabolome reprogrammig in Vitis vinifera cv. Trincadeira berries upon infection with Botrytis cinerea” published in the top-ranking journal Journal of Experimental Botany. In 2021 she was invited to join the group of viticulture specialists of CNOIV. Recently, another paper (on Omics and grapevine) published in Journal of Experimental Botany was awarded as the EDITOR´S CHOICE of Volume 72, Issue 18. In 2021 and 2022 she was recognized as the semester professor by Biology Students (Branch Cell Biology and Biotechnology) as professor of Introduction to Plant Biotechnology. In January 2022 she was Invited Professor for two weeks at BOKU (Vienna) and taught at the International Master program of Viticulture, Enology, and Wine business. Recently, she was interviewed by Center for Biotechnology Information-CIB regarding the work of her group on gene editing in tomato.