Rita Caridade Silva is a PhD candidate in Biomedicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto (FMUP), where her research focuses on developing innovative therapeutic strategies for Parkinson's Disease (PD). Her doctoral project, "Repurposing Multimodal Strategies for Parkinson's Disease: Creating the Path for Disease Delay and Repair", funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), began in January 2023. She holds a degree in Applied Biology from the University of Minho (2019) and a Master's in Health Sciences from the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Medicine, University of Minho (2021). Her early training bridged oncology and neuroscience: her bachelor's internship at ICVS examined the biological effects of RKIP expression in lung adenocarcinoma, while her graduate work focused on neurodegeneration. Together, these experiences gave her a broad, multidisciplinary technical foundation — from cell culture, Western blotting, and cell viability, proliferation, and migration assays to in vivo models of neurodegeneration (FELASA category C certified). Her Master's dissertation, "Combining Stem Cells Secretome (SCS) and N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to Parkinson's Disease modelling and repair," was supervised by Dr Fábio Teixeira and Dr António Salgado. This work identified NAC as a modulator of brain repair, capable of promoting neuroprotection and preserving dopaminergic integrity, and formed the basis for her first published results. Building on this, she joined Dr Fábio Teixeira's group as a research fellow in 2022 on the project "Focused Ultrasound combined with Stem Cells Secretome and Pharmacotherapies: establishing a Multimodal path for Parkinson's disease repair." During this period, she completed a four-month rotation at NeuroSpin (France), acquiring expertise in MRI-guided focused ultrasound (FUS) and combined drug-delivery techniques for PD. A pivotal milestone in her development was an 11-month research stay at the University of Oxford in 2025. Working within the Wade-Martins group under Dr Hugo Fernandes, she mastered complex human iPSC technology and established dopaminergic and cortical cultures, a crucial step in evaluating drug-repurposing strategies to halt PD progression. Through rigorous cell screening and tissue-culture techniques, the resulting data represent a significant advance for the field. Rita has authored five peer-reviewed publications, two as first author (a literature review and a results paper). She is a committed science communicator, having presented her work across a wide range of formats and audiences, from major international conferences, including AD/PD (oral presentation), ENCODS (poster award), IBRO, FENS, and Stem Cells in Neuroscience (Tübingen), to national meetings and pitch and poster sessions, where she has honed her ability to distil a complex research project into a clear, engaging message for specialist and general audiences. Her contributions have been recognised with the PAPRE Prize from the Porto Polytechnic Institute, a Travel Grant from the Portuguese Society for Neuroscience (SPN), and selection for a high-level ECNP workshop on applied neuroscience (France, 2025). Now in the final year of her PhD, she is eager to share the story behind her data and to continue contributing to the search for disease-modifying treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.