Joana Bicker (JB) is an Invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Coimbra (FFUC), integrated researcher at Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT) and a European Certified Pharmacologist (EuCP). She was also PI of project EpiMod (2022.03133.PTDC). She concluded a MSc in Pharmaceutical Sciences (2011) and a PhD in Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy (2018) at FFUC. JB was selected as researcher in project 4Epilepsy (2019-2022) and team member in project N2BD (2018-2021). She was/is also team member of three other research projects (Mitoboost, Tryp-to-Brain, and NasalStep). She has a Scopus h-index of 19 and 1294 citations with 55 published articles in international journals. In addition, she is co-inventor of two patents. She was Invited Guest Editor of a Special Issue in Pharmaceutics (MDPI) and has been a regular reviewer of publications from Nature, Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI and others. She received a Research Initiation Grant and a FCT individual PhD Fellow, and 12 awards, among which is the Lusitan Pharmaceutical Society Award. In 2024, she was awarded a Sandander Scholarship grant for the Innovation in Teaching course by Harvard Business Education. She supervised 1 PhD student from the Federal University of São Paulo (Brazil) and is currently supervising 3 FCT-funded PhD students. Her research interests include the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and CNS disorders, namely the development of BBB repairing treatments and new pharmacological approaches. She has experience in vitro/in vivo pharmacokinetic (ADME) and pharmacodynamic assays applied to drug screening of molecules directed at epilepsy, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as therapeutic drug monitoring (personalized medicine), intranasal administration, and development/validation of bioanalytical techniques. She also has certification as Investigator-Coordinator in Animal Sciences (EU Functions A+B+D) by FELASA. She has collaborations with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries (e.g., BIAL, TargTex SA) and health institutions (Coimbra Hospital and University Centre, CHUC.EPE). From an international perspective she has acquired international training and collaborates with research teams from the University of Barcelona (Spain), Federal University of São Paulo (Brazil) and University of Warwick (UK).