Filomena Adega is Assistant Professor in Genetics at the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology (DGB) of the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro since 2019, the current Coordinator of the Genetics4U Laboratory at UTAD and an Integrated Researcher member of the Biosystems and Integrative Sciences Institute, BioISI-Pólo UTAD, in the CytoGenomics Lab. Filomena has a graduation in Animal Sciences (1998) and a PhD in Genetics (2006). Her academic activity started in 1997, as monitor/collaborator at DGB, and she has been teaching in several curricular units in Genetics and Molecular cytogenetics, Animal in vitro cell culture, Cell imaging, Cell biology, Human genetics, Molecular Evolution, etc, along the years, where she contributed to the higher education of hundreds of students in her areas of expertise. Between 2013 and 2019 she was an Invited Assistant Professor at DGB. Currently she is the Director of the Master in Biotechnology for Health Sciences, Vice-director of the PhD programme in Comparative Molecular Genetics and Vogal of the 1st cycle in Biomedical Sciences at UTAD. Filomena has supervised or co-supervised undergraduate students (38 completed), master's (17 completed and 4 in progress) and PhD (7 completed, 1 in progress) that are now following their professional/research path, thus greatly contributing to the increase of highly prepared and specialized human resources. It was also around 1998 that she started developing her research activity with a research fellow grant in an I&D project, followed by an FCT PhD grant in her area of choice, Comparative Chromosomics and Genome Evolution. Later she earned a post-doc FCT grant and afterwards she was hired as Assistant Researcher for the Centre for Genomics and Biotechnology, Associated Laboratory Institute of Biotechnology and Bioengineering (CGB-UTAD/IBB), under the FCT National Scientific and Technological System - Science 2007 Programme, in Animal Genomics (2008-2013). Regarding this scientific activity, Filomena has indicators demonstrated since 1999, having already published 51 scientific papers in journals with scientific arbitration and indexed in the Scopus source, 2 book chapters, numerous abstracts in Scopus scientific journals and more than 270 new sequences in GenBank (NCBI). These are mainly in the areas of Comparative Genomics, Chromosome Architectures, Establishment of cellular models for oncogenomics, Satellite DNA, non-coding RNA, the Mobilome and the way it acts on Genome evolution both structurally and functionally but also how it causes disease, using different cell models and organisms, such as the Chiroptera. During the years, she has interacted with more than 150 collaborators in co-authoring scientific papers and research projects; actively participated as researcher in 13 projects and regularly revised manuscripts for different scientific journals. This is clear evidence of her contribution to the advance of knowledge, not only at the scientific community level, but also to the society in general. Filomena is responsible for the laser microdissection station and co-responsible for the in vitro animal cell culture facility and the CytoGenomics Lab confocal microscopy unit. In 2020 she was one of the founders of the UTAD's COVID-19 Testing Centre that voluntarily molecularly diagnosed more than 56K SARS-CoV-2 samples during the pandemics. This team effort was vital in the control of the pandemics in the North of Portugal and the proof that science serves the communities at a multitude of levels. Recently she integrated the group of three Researchers that founded the Genetics4U Lab, a multidisciplinary genetics service unit of UTAD serving the academia and the community in general with fundamental and applied research and specialized diagnosis.