Rodrigo Costa is an Associate Professor (since 2020) at the Department of Bioengineering (DBE) of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon. He graduated in Biological Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1998 and obtained his M.Sc. degree in Ecology from this same University in 2001. He acquired his Ph.D. degree in Life Sciences from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, in 2006, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, from 2006 to 2008. He was then awarded the Research Scientist contracts Ciência (2008) and FCT Investigator (2015) from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). During this period, he founded and led the Microbial Ecology and Evolution Research Group (MicroEcoEvo) at the Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMar), Algarve University, Portugal, where he built a novel molecular microbiology laboratory acquired through extramural funding. Prof. Rodrigo Costa was an invited affiliate (Research Scientist) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), University of California at Berkeley, USA (March 2019-August 2021), and of CCMAR from 2016 to 2021. He holds the position (by invitation) of Ambassador of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) in Portugal, is an invited member of the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports, and member of three academic societies. In 2019, he chaired the International Symposium on Bacterial Genetics and Ecology (BAGECO) in Lisbon, Portugal, and since then is a member of the steering scientific committee of the symposium. Prof. Costa has authored > 100 scientific publications encompassing original research articles in international journals, book chapters, and theses. His published work has been cited c. 7,000 times, featuring an h-index of 43, an i-10 index of 67, and studies published in top-ranked, multidisciplinary journals such as Microbiomes, The ISME Journal, Nature Communications, Nature Microbiology, Science of the Total Environment, mSystems, and Environmental Microbiology, among others. Prof. Costa participated in over 220 communications (> 80 oral) in scientific conferences, workshops, and colloquia. Since 2010, he supervised several post-doctoral fellows, Ph.D., M.Sc., and undergraduate students - in the framework of 19 R&D projects (10 as PI / Co-PI), leading six PhD thesis (five ongoing) and 28 Master thesis (eight ongoing) completions, and securing > 2 MEuros extramural research funding in the last five years. Prof. Rodrigo Costa is the coordinator of the course units Fundamentals of Ecology and Microbiomes at IST/ULisbon, being awarded by students with the Excellence in Teaching prize in several disciplines across the years. His research addresses the diversity and function of microorganisms in natural and fabricated biomes - with emphasis on Eukaryote-Prokaryote symbioses studied with metagenomics approaches -, their implications to host/ecosystem health and climate regulation, and potential use as renewable sources of innovative biotechnological appliances. Current research projects focus on harnessing the metabolism of bacterial symbionts of marine organisms and developing microbiome engineering approaches to (i) suppress microbial diseases and mitigate climate change stressors in aquaculture and coral reef ecosystems, and (ii) design marine-based bioproducts of application across multiple sectors (e.g., health, environment, food, and feed) to leverage the circular blue bioeconomy. Prof. Costa belongs to the group of fifteen specialists invited by the Portuguese Government in 2023 to propose a package of legislative, financial, and scientific competitive measures for the development of the Blue Biotechnology Sector in Portugal. Full CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TEj7hpMElFkqLhJSL9OEMzBqmafYvVGC/view?usp=sharing