Ligia Tavares obtained her PhD in Biochemistry in 2011 at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Neil Brockdorff. In her PhD work she studied the mechanisms of recruitment of polycomb (PcG) during in mouse development, to understand how chromatin was regulated and transcription controlled. As result, she challenged the model of PcG recruitment valid at the time, by showing that PRC1 can be recruited independently of PRC2 in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) via RYBP-PRC1, a new complex identified by her (Tavares et al, Cell 2012). As a postdoc she joined a collaborative project between the laboratory of Glial Cell Biology (headed by João B. Relvas) and the Cell Growth and Differentiation group (headed by Paulo Pereira) at IBMC/i3S Institute of Research and Innovation in Health (University of Porto), having been awarded an EMBO Long-term Fellowship. There she studied signalling pathways important for glia proliferation, migration and neuron-glia interactions, focusing on integrin (Tavares et al., Glia 2015) and Rho GTPase pathways (Tavares et al., Dev. Biol. 2021). She also studied the role of neuron progenitors in inducing a non-autonomous cancer-like phenotype in glia. In fact, myc loss-of-function in neuron progenitors induce glia increased proliferation and overmigration (Plos Genetics 2017). During her postdoc she attracted competitive funding, being awarded an FCT exploratory project as Principal Investigator (50k) and the NORTE2020 project (˜88k €; 2016 to 2019). She is currently at the Stem Cells & Neurogenesis laboratory (also at IBMC/i3S), headed by Diogo S. Castro. There, she continues to explore her interests on transcription/gene regulation, neural development/glia and cancer. She studied transcriptional mechanisms regulating vertebrate neurogenesis (Han et al., Neuron 2021). Now she is linking the neural development/glia and cancer, and is focused on the role of the transcription factors Zeb1 and Zeb2 in glioblastoma. Ligia published 11 articles in journals including Cell, Neuron, NCB, Plos Genetics and Glia (including 2 as senior/corresponding author), and has presented her work 9 times (oral presentation) at several national and international meetings. Her supervision experience includes 3 research assistants, 1 MSc student, 2 undergraduates and co-supervised 3 MSc students. Additionally, she has been a BSc and MSc thesis jury. She has been an Invited lecturer in the annual courses of the GABBA PhD program (University of Porto) and the PhD program in Biomedicine (University of Coimbra) for several years. Ligia is also one of the founding members of the All Time GABBA (ATG) PhD alumni association, having enrolled several board positions (Advisory board, treasury, president), being currently vice-President. From 2019 to 2021 I was part of the SPBD board, where I coordinate the organization of SPBD sponsored symposia.