Rosa Fernandes is an Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra (FMUC; Portugal), and is an integrated member of the Coimbra Institute for Clinical and Biomedical Research (iCBR). She is the co-coordinator of the Research Management Office at FMUC. R. Fernandes was a member of the Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee (ORBEA) of FMUC. R. Fernandes is a Biochemist with a Master´s in Vision Sciences (1995) and received her PhD (2005) in Biomedical Sciences from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra (FMUC), Portugal. Part of her PhD experimental work in the field of diabetic retinopathy was performed at the Department of Internal Medicine, Medical Center, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, U.S.A.), and the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee (Dundee, Scotland). Her main research interests are to 1) understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying retinal degenerative diseases, namely diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), focusing on the disruption of the blood–retinal barrier; 2) identify novel biomarkers in tears for the diagnosis and staging of DR and AMD, as well as monitoring responses to therapies or predicting outcomes in response to them; 3) develop innovative therapeutic strategies for these two retinal diseases. She has co-authored five book chapters and 82 peer-reviewed publications.