Helena Maria Pinheiro, born in 1960, obtained in 1984 an MEng in Chemical Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. She received an additional MSc in Biochemical Engineering in 1988 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering in1993, both from IST, the latter with work on steroid dehydrogenation with immobilised whole cells in organic media. She is presently Associate Professor at IST, Department of Bioengineering (DBE), teaching Environmental (Bio)Technology, Integrated Bioprocess Engineering and Bio-Engineering Plant Design. She has co-ordinated several R&D projects on immobilised-cell applications and on the use of sequencing batch bioreactors for the biotreatment of industrial wastewaters containing synthetic chemicals (dyes, surfactants). More recently her R&D interests include the application of spectroscopy and chemometrics to stream and process monitoring in wastewater systems. Her Web of Science publication record presently gives her an h-index of 28. She is an integrated member of the R&D unit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (iBB) of IST.