Rosa Sancho is Director of Discoveries at MIA-Portugal (Multidisciplinary Institute on Ageing), Universidade de Coimbra, where she has been part of the senior leadership team since 2023. She supports delivery of the institute's science strategy during a critical growth phase, with responsibility for external funding, ethics governance, training and development, and human resources, and has implemented core administrative and operational systems to strengthen MIA-Portugal's competitiveness in national and European funding frameworks. Rosa's career spans bench science and research strategy leadership. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London and completed postdoctoral research at King's College London, working on ER-mitochondria interactions in motor neurone disease and BDNF signalling in Alzheimer's disease. She then spent over a decade at funding agency Alzheimer's Research UK as Head of Research, where she oversaw an annual research portfolio of approximately £30 million, managed several funding schemes across discovery, translational and clinical research, and led strategic funding initiatives including the Drug Discovery Alliance and Dementia Consortium. She subsequently served as Head of Translation Operations at the Francis Crick Institute, coordinating cross-functional teams to accelerate translational research.