My primary research interest is to unravel the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control the formation, maintenance and function of subcellular compartments in neurons, such as the synaptic compartment, and which are responsible for nearly every aspect of neuronal function, from brain wiring to information processing. I had extensive training in cellular and synapse biology during my graduate and postdoctoral studies. During my Ph.D. at Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology-University of Coimbra (CNC-UC), under the supervision of Prof. Ana Luísa Carvalho, I revealed the hippocampal function of ghrelin, an appetite stimulating hormone, and its receptor. This work was published in PNAS (Ribeiro et al., 2014) and Science Signaling (Ribeiro et al., 2021), and it gave me a great deal of knowledge on how synapses and neural circuits operate. I then moved to Prof. Joris de Wit's lab at VIB-KU Leuven for my postdoctoral studies. Here, I acquired strong expertise on imaging, biochemical and proteomic approaches to study protein trafficking and cell adhesion interactions in neurons, which I used to identify new molecules and mechanisms involved in the regulation of the protein composition of synapses. This work was published in Neuron (Savas, Ribeiro et al., 2015) and PLoS Biology (Ribeiro et al., 2019). Recently, I have received funding from FCT (project grant and CEEC) and European Commission (MSCA) to initiate my independent line of research at CNC-UC. The goal of our group is to unravel the molecular machinery involved in the establishment and maintenance of the neuronal compartmentalization, i.e. specification of the dendrites, axon and its sub-compartments, and by doing so, we aim to elucidate the pathogenic mechanisms of the neuronal dysfunction underlying many brain disorders.