I completed my PhD in 2003 at The Institute of Cancer Research of the University of London and recently graduated with an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. Previously, I graduated with an MSc in Human Molecular Genetics in 1999 from Imperial College Faculty of Medicine and a 5-year BSc in Applied Chemistry - Biotechnology in 1997 from Universidade Nova de Lisboa Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia. I hold an Assistant Professor with Tenure position at the Universidade do Algarve (UAlg) and am a Principal Investigator and the Coordinator of the UAlg's node of the research unit CINTESIS and Laboratório Associado RISE - Rede de Investigação em Saúde: do Laboratório à Saúde Comunitária. I am also an Invited Principal Investigator in Centro de Ciências do Mar since 2023. In 2022, I co-founded expressTEC, a spin-off of UAlg dedicated to developing innovative diagnostic solutions for cancer care. I am interested in studying allelic imbalance in gene expression, a common feature of our genome. Due to regulatory polymorphisms, which can occur both in cis- and trans-, many of our genes are preferentially expressed from one allele. This unequal expression can contribute to susceptibility to common diseases. My main aim is to use this concept to develop a new method to study predisposition to breast cancer. My goal is to identify new breast cancer predisposition loci and understand the mechanisms by which they increase the risk of disease. I hypothesize that the most efficient search for further breast cancer risk loci is to focus susceptibility studies on variants that show regulatory potential. I propose a change in the current approach to identifying genetic cancer risk by introducing the use of a quantifiable read-out of the effect of cis-regulatory variants in case-control studies. Additionally, I am investigating this imbalance's role in tumour biology, namely in the effect of mutations and treatment response.