Carolina Mota Natal has a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry (July 2018, grade: 14/20) and a Master's Degree in Chemical Analysis and Characterization Techniques (April 2021, grade: 18/20) both from the University of Minho (Portugal). In the final individual BSc project in Biochemistry she studied a series of triphenylamine derivatives as fluorimetric ion probes in biomedical settings. Her master's thesis (2020-2021) was part of a FCT-funded project "BioP&FoodP: Biopesticides and Food Preservatives from Nanoencapsulated Plant Extracts: Biological Evaluation, Molecular Modelling and Synthesis (PTDC/ASP-AGR/30154/2017)", with the title "Derivatives of natural compounds with potential application as biopesticides ". During her master thesis, she chemically synthesized and further purified derivatives of natural compounds. Carolina also characterized these new compounds by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) and Mass Spectrometry (MS). Her master thesis resulted in one peer-reviewed paper as first author published in RSC Advances, one peer-reviewed paper as co-author published in Arch. Pharm., one oral presentation and paper presented at an international conference (h-index of 1 and 22 citations). She was part of a project funded by FEDER - SMASUS project (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-047007) from March 2022 to June 2023, in collaboration with industry. From this work, she presented 3 posters and 1 oral communication at international conferences. She is part of PURE project funded by European Union's Horizon 2020 (Grant agreement No 899732) from july 2023 to march 2025 in collaboration with international partners. Carolina worked on the development of the chemical synthesis strategies of affinity ligands in both solid and liquid phases. She purified the ligands with HPLC and characterized them by NMR and MS (1 manuscript to be submitted). Under this project she supervised a MSc student from Germany. Additionally, she also worked on the immobilization of biological ligands in chromatographic supports and characterized their binding capacity for immunoglobulins (1 manuscript to be submitted). Currently, she is a PhD student in Biotechnology at UCIBIO, NOVA FCT (2023.01023.BD). Her PhD project is in collaboration with Dr Lingg (University of BOKU, Austria) and she is developing new biological and synthetic affinity ligands to purify biotherapeutics. She will use in vitro evolution to discover the biological ligands. She works daily with organic chemistry and different conjugation chemistries, HPLC/NMR/MS techniques, affinity ligands development and characterization, chromatography, and protein electrophoresis methods. She was part of the organizing committee of PepperSchool2024, an international thematic school in peptide and protein engineering. She is interested in combining chemistry and biotechnology to develop new affinity ligands to purify recombinant proteins relevant for various biotechnological applications.