Helena Soares got her degree in Biology from Faculty of Sciences of University of Lisbon, and her PhD in Biomedical Sciences, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas "Abel Salazar" of University of Porto. She is a professor in Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Sáude de Lisboa which mission is to educate outstanding health care professionals able to develop preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic innovations adapting to the new demands of societies. She has been engaged in many organizational activities, including Biology Scientific Area Coordinator, Director of the Department of Natural and Exact Sciences, President of Scientific Council, President of Ethics Council and General School Council. She was between 1999 to 2009 principal investigator of the Stress & Cytoskeleton group in Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC). In 2010 she moved her research group to Center of Chemistry and Biochemistry and is now at the Center of Structural Chemistry, Faculty Sciences, University of Lisbon. In her contribution to health practice she highlights 6 month period where she gave technical and scientific advice to the Dean of Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of National University of East Timor (UNTL), the only public university of East Timor (near Indonesia) a developing country and a former Portuguese colony. There, she helped to implement the graduate course in Pharmacy and the Scientific Council of the Faculty. She has been developing research in the field of cilia and microtubule biology and is interested in cell architecture and polarity. In this context her major achievements were: 1) her pioneering work showing that the CCT subunits of the cytosolic chaperonin are localized and play critical roles in cilia structure which have been later proven by cilia proteomics; 2) provide the first evidences that cytokinesis and morphogenesis are mechanistically linked through the Mob1 protein a polarity factor and 3) to have characterized for the first time the human centrosomal TBCCD1 a key factor in centrosome positioning. She published about 45 research papers and chapter books and successfully supervised 2 post-Docs, 7 PhD students (all pursuing scientific careers) and more than 10 undergraduate and Master students. She is a Editorial Member of Biology (MDPI) and Associate Editor for Cellular Biochemistry in Frontiers Cell and Developmental Biology and Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. She was a member of the BMBS COST Action BM1102 Ciliates as model systems to study genome evolution, mechanisms of non-Mendelian inheritance, and their roles in environmental adaptation. She has been appointed as evaluator of international scientific projects for institutions like the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of the Czech Republic which manages international cooperation for research and development in the Czech Republic, the European Science foundation, the COST- European Cooperation in Science and Technology and projects from Bilateral Scientific Cooperation programs of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Recently she was appointed as remote referee assisting the ERC evaluation panels. To assist the European Research Council (ERC) in the peer review evaluation of frontier research proposals. She organized several international scientific events namely a Cytoskeleton Forum and EMBO/FEBS workshop. She received several fellowships from Portuguese and International institutions , as for example the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB), Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), European Science Foundation, COST, The European Union, Luso-American Development Foundation and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She was awarded with the prize for the best scientific article of the year 2013 of Centro de Química e Bioquímica da Fauldade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, selected by the international advisory board.