Duarte Barral (DB) is a tenured Associate Professor with Habilitation at NMS-UNL, with over two decades of expertise in investigating the mechanisms underlying membrane trafficking in both health and disease contexts. DB earned his Degree in Microbiology and Genetics from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in 1997, followed by a PhD in Cell Biology from Imperial College London in 2003. He then ventured into the field of immunology, undertaking a Post-Doctoral Fellow position (2003) at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. In 2009, DB became a Principal Investigator (PI) at NMS-UNL, where he established the Membrane Traffic in Disease group, which has made significant contributions to the fields of molecular cell biology, skin pigmentation, and oncobiology. Before attaining his current position, through an international competitive selection process, DB secured his own salary for 19 years through several competitive calls: undergraduate, PhD and Post-Doctoral fellowships, as well as Principal Investigator contracts (Ciência 2008 and FCT Investigator, both funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT). Such achievements underscore his exceptional academic profile. DB’s research aims to unravel the regulatory roles of GTPases belonging to the Rab and Arf families in the trafficking of lysosomes and lysosome-related organelles such as melanosomes, and elucidating how dysregulation of these processes contributes to human diseases, notably cancer. Indeed, DB has helped uncover the previously unknown role of several of these proteins, namely Rab27a (Stinchcombe et al., J Cell Biol., 2001; Hume et al., Traffic, 2002; Barral et al., J Clin. Invest., 2002), Rab35 (Kuhns et al., EMBO Rep., 2019), Arl8b (Garg et al, Immunity, 2011), and Arl13b (Barral et al., PNAS, 2012; Casalou et al., J. Cell Sci., 2014; Casalou et al., Cancers, 2019). The latter reported a novel role for Arl13b in the regulation of breast cancer cell migration and invasion. DB has demonstrated a remarkable ability to secure competitive funding, amassing over 2.75 million € for research projects as PI/Coordinator, and in successfully overseeing the completion of 10 funded projects. These projects received national funding, including from FCT and Liga Portuguesa Contra o Cancro – LPCC, as well as from international sources, namely the European Commission. He also has a solid and consistent track record of publishing impactful studies, with 52 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and 3007 citations (h-index 30).