My name is Paulo Antas. I have a first degree in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto and a Master’s degree in Clinical Analysis from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Porto. In December 2018, I started my PhD in Biomedicine at iBiMED (University of Aveiro, Portugal), under the supervision of Evelina Gatti and Philippe Pierre from CIML (Marseille, France) and iBiMED, and of Catarina Almeida from iBiMED. I have been studying the reciprocal influence between innate immune activation and autophagy, dissecting the molecular players regulating this crosstalk. I am using a human plasmacytoid dendritic cell line (CAL-1) as model, since these cells are important sentinels of anti-viral immunity, as well as important contributors to the pathogenesis of some autoimmune diseases (e.g. lupus). The interest in my current research topic emerged after starting to work as a research fellow at the Institute of Biomedicine (iBiMED) from the University of Aveiro, in the frame of the joint international laboratory between the University of Aveiro and The National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France), on the project “Role of ER-stress associated molecules IRE1 and GADD34 on innate activation by nucleic acids” (ref. PTDC/IMI-IMU/3615/2014). I have presented results of this work as posters in several meetings (including TOLL 2018: Editing Innate Immunity, Porto, 2018; 1st Meeting on Vesicular Biology, Coimbra, 2018; XLIII SPI Annual meeting, Porto, 2017) and as an oral communication in the 6th Workshop in Immunology, Aveiro, 2018. Previously, different research works enabled me to develop critical thinking and helped me to evolve both professionally and personally, reinforcing my motivation to pursue a scientific career. During my master’s degree, I participated in a research project of the Flow Cytometry Laboratory of the Clinical Haematology Service (Porto Hospital Center) aiming to evaluate and optimize the eosin-5-maleimide test for diagnosis of Hereditary Spherocytosis by flow cytometry, whose results were presented as a poster at the “4ªs Jornadas de Iniciação à Investigação Clínica” [4th Journeys of Initiation to Clinical Research]. In 2014, I worked at CIIMAR (University of Porto), collaborating in a project related to fouling organisms, in which we successfully sequenced several genes encoding cement proteins responsible for the adhesion of these organisms to the substrate. The results were published in the journal “Marine Biotechnology” in 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10126-018-9856-y), an article of which I and Miguel Rocha are joint first authors. Later (2015), in the same research institute, I studied the gene expression of several glutathione-S-transferases in 2 bivalve species after exposure to a cyanobacteria extract containing the toxin microcystin, under the project PTDC/MAR-EST/4614/2012. The results were included in two articles: one published in the journal “Ecotoxicology” in 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-018-1980-y, in which I am first author; other published in the journal “Toxicon” in 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxicon.2017.07.003), in which I am second author. My first research grant was in 2013 at the Endocrine Disruptors and Emergent Contaminants (EDEC) research group (CIIMAR), in the project "The invertebrate repertoire of nuclear receptors: evolutionary and endocrine disruption insights" (ref. PTDC/MAR/105199/2008/BI/2013-007).