Raquel P Andrade obtained a degree in Biochemistry from Universidade de Lisboa (1996) and a PhD degree in Sciences from Universidade do Minho in collaboration with Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt (2002). After a 6-year post-doc training at ICVS (Univ. Minho), she secured a Research Team Leader position at ICVS/3Bs (Univ. Minho) until 2014. Since 2014, Raquel is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Algarve and is head of the Temporal Control of Cell Differentiation Lab at the Algarve Biomedical Center Research Institute (ABC-RI). Since 2021, she is also a researcher of the Champalimaud Research Program, under the scope of the Algarve Biomedical Center partnership. Raquel has published in international peer-reviewed high profile journals (such as PNAS, Nucleic Acids Research, RNA, Development, Clinical Cancer Research,...) and participated in multiple national/international financed research projects, 3 as principal investigator. Her lab is dedicated to studying the Embryo Clock (EC) in temporal control of vertebrate development. Gene expression oscillations, driven by negative feedback mechanisms, are at the core of the EC mechanism and underlie the periodic formation of the vertebrate axial skeleton precursors . This molecular time-counting mechanism is also operating in embryonic and neural stem cells, contributing to cell identity specification. The aim is to understand 1) the functional relevance of EC oscillations, and 2) how the periodicity of the EC is regulated in different tissues and species. The molecular parallelisms between embryo development and tumorigenesis are a focus of collaborative research efforts.