I'm Ana Catarina Pereira. I was awarded with a PhD grant from the Portuguese Research Council “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia” (FCT) in the PhD Scholarship Award Competition 2019, and I was selected to join the competitive doctoral program of Health Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Currently, I am a PhD student of the doctoral program of Health Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra. Contextualizing my academic and scientific journey, I concluded my BSc in Biomedical Sciences in 2016 (University of Algarve, 2016). After that, I started my Masters Degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology (University of Coimbra, 2018). My Masters thesis aimed to investigate the role of NLRP3 inflammasome activation in Bipolar Disorder (BD), and it was conducted at the “Cell Metabolism and Quality Control” group under the supervision of Cláudia MF Pereira (PhD) and co-supervision of Carlos Bandeira-Duarte (PhD), where I developed interest in understanding the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. From December 2018 until December 2019, I received a fellowship from the CNC’s HealthyAging2020 project to understand the role of cellular stress on innate immunity.