Evguenia Pavlovna Bekman completed a PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 1999 at Universidade do Porto, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar and Master in Biology/Animal Physiology/Embryology in 1989 at Moskovskij Gosudarstvennyj Universitet imeni M V Lomonosova, Biologiceskij fakul'tet. She is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences, Lisbon University, and assistant professor at Egas Moniz School of Health and Science, Monte de Caparica. She has a long-standing record in neuronal differentiation, using both embryonic stem cells (ES) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), being a last author of a pioneering report describing transcriptional signatures of in vitro derived neural progenitors recapitulating embryonic development (Abranches et al., 2009, >270 citations). She also has an expertise in BAC recombineering, CRISPR/Cas9 and establishment of engineered pluripotent stem cell lines, with successful participation in the 6th FP Integrated Project “FunGenES- Functional Genomics in Engineered ES cells”. More recently, she has focused her research on cerebellar organoid models using human iPSC lines (Silva et al., 2020, 2021, 2021a), being also a corresponding author of publication featuring 2D differentiation as a model for pre-natal exposure to cannabinoids (Miranda et al., 2020). In total, she has published 30 research articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and contributed to 3 book chapters, having more than 1600 citations and h-index of 16. She was awarded 2 research grants, supervised 2 PhD and 16 MSc theses (and 1 ongoing). The main focus of her research is on establishing brain organoid models derived from patient iPS cells for unravelling disease mechanisms and new therapeutic approaches for neurodevelopmental disorders. As a complimentary field of research, she is developing isogenic iPSC lines using CRISPR/Cas9 (data in prep.) as a toolkit for high-fidelity disease modelling approaches. Her research on cerebellar organoid model for Angelman syndrome, in collaboration with Simão Teixeira da Rocha (co-PIs of the project), was funded by European Angelman Syndrome Alliance in 2021 and also resulted in invitation to participate in the European EURAS project (HORIZON -HLTH-2022-DISEASE-06-04EU-EURAS) starting in 2023. She is also collaborating with Portuguese Association of Angelman Syndrome families, Angel.pt, taking active part in the initiatives of raising awareness for rare diseases and science communication for general public.