Dr. Sónia Negrão is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin and the PI of the Crop Stress Interaction group (CSI-Dublin). Her research focuses on plant physiology with the specific aim of improving plant stress tolerance. She is the recipient of the prestigious "SFI President of Ireland Future Research Leaders Award" due to her contributions as emergent leader in crop stress physiology. Dr. Sónia Negrão¿s research expertise covers the areas of plant physiology, abiotic stress tolerance, high-throughput phenotyping, and genomics, and she has always been captivated by the possibility of understanding the genetic mechanisms of abiotic stress tolerance in resilient plant species. Her research vision also integrates temporal resolution of plants adaptation to stress using state-os-the-art plant imaging equipment. Dr. Sónia Negrão graduated in Agronomy, majoring in Crop breeding at Instituto Superior de Agronomia (Lisbon, Portugal). In 2008, she completed her PhD in Biology at ITQB-Nova (Oeiras, Portugal), focusing on breeding Portuguese Heritage rice in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI- Philippines). She then pursued a Post-Doc position at ITQB in collaboration with IRRI targeting rice genomics and allele mining for salinity stress. She worked five years as a research scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia where she contributed to several projects involving the genetic dissection of the mechanisms of salinity tolerance in different species. Her work has enabled elucidation of the genetic basis for resilience using resilient species and underutilised crop resources, thus promoting plant adaptation to changing climates and informing breeding strategies. She has published in high-ranking journals including Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Plants, The Plant Journal and Plant Physiology. Her research is highly impactful, with >3600 citations (h-index 22), and she has developed an extensive list of worldwide collaborators as seen in her publication list. Dr. Sónia Negrão is a lecturer in several undergraduate and graduate modules, and has successfully supervised over 11 Ph.D. students. She is a passionate advocate for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), co-chairing the EDI committee and co-leading the Silver Athena SWAN at her department. She is also an active and excellent science communicator, with over 1.1K followers on Twitter, promoting public engagement with science. In Portugal, Dr. Negrão was known to be a science communicator, particularly on GM issues, in school debates and on radio. Her outreach activities also involved activities with a large number of stakeholders, namely farmers, industry partners, and technical staff.