Ana Raquel Marcelino Mesquita completed her BSc in Applied Biology in 2003 at the School of Sciences from the Univesity of Minho and her PhD in Health Sciences in 2008 at the Medical School of the same University. She published more than 50 scientific articles in international peer-review journals, co-supervises and/or supervised 7 PhD thesis and 21 MSc dissertations. Participates and/or participated as Principal investigator in 5 project(s) and as a team member in other 9 project(s). Her main research focus is on the neurobiological mechanisms of socio-emotional development in children living in different contexts of early-life adversity. Based on a multi-level approach, with a multidisciplinary team, she seeks to understand how environment and genetics interact in the definition of socio-emotional developmental trajectories and their neurobiological endophenotypes. Additionally, she has widened the focus of her research to epigenetic processes, which translate to a more dynamic interaction between genes and environment helping to disentangle how early experience "gets under the skin". To this end, she has used methodologies that cross molecular biology with neurosciences anchored in the developmental psychopathology perspective.