I was awarded the PhD in Biology with the study of the molecular mechanisms involved in the evolution of a genetic code alteration (Silva et al., 2007). As a Research Associate in the Population Genetics group at IPATIMUP, I became interested in the evolution of proteins and metabolic pathways, in particular, the dynamics of the NAD metabolic network and its roles in health and disease. These enzymes have been implicated in aging, infection and disease, and are the targets of a novel class of antitumor drugs (Duarte-Pereira et al., 2021). I was involved in the development of bioinformatics tools to detect genome rearrangements and pathogen signatures, with implications for diagnosis and therapeutics (Silva et al., 2015). Additional lines of investigation address the mechanisms of anti-fungal resistance in clinical isolates (Branco et al., 2021), and biomarker identification (Soares Martins et al., 2021).