Ana Rita Franco is a Marie Curie PhD student in the MSCA-ETN project BactiVax (www.bactivax.eu) . She received her master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Porto in 2019. Her research interests mainly focus on medicinal chemistry and her previous work was related to the synthesis of natural product’s analogues with different applications, such as antifouling. Currently, she aims to develop new effective adjuvants to be incorporated in vaccines targeting problematic bacterial pathogens.