Susana Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Leiden University (Netherlands) and a visiting fellow at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). With over 13 years of experience training translators at the university level, she began teaching as an invited assistant at NOVA University in Portugal, where she taught technical and specialized translation. Prior to her academic career, she spent 15 years in the translation industry. In addition to working as a specialized translator, she was a Language Lead and editor for major tech companies, including Apple and Google. Following her PhD in medical translation aimed at experts, her research has centred on how health information is accessed, read, and understood in healthcare contexts, with or without translation technologies. She is currently leading a research project on reader reception of translated health information, particularly examining the impact of MT on the reading process, funded by the Dutch national research council (NWO). In the last 5 years, since defending her PhD thesis, she has published over 20 research outputs in peer-reviewed and highly-regarded journals (Target, The Translator, Translation Spaces, Perspectives and The Journal of Specialised Translation) and publishers (Routledge) on health communication, migration, translation technology and machine translation, and audiovisual translation. Susana has recently contributed chapters to the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Migration (2024) and the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Forthcoming). She has co-edited a special issue of Perspectives on Pivot Audiovisual Translation (2023) and a special issue of Translation Studies on Translation Trust (2025). She leads the Linguistic Data and Terminology working group (with Pilar Sanchez Gijon) and is a board member of the European Masters in Translation network. She is also the founder and coordinator of NITS, the Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders (with Ana Guerberof-Arenas and Antonio Toral), which aims to strengthen academic collaboration in the region. From 2020 to 2004, she served as Reviews editor of the specialised Journal of Audiovisual Translation (JAT). Since 2019, she has secured competitive research funding as Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator for several projects exploring healthcare communication and the impact of translation technologies, including machine translation, in migratory contexts (awarded by the Dutch national research council NWO, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and Gratama-Foundation / Leiden University Fund). Her work has been nominated for awards such as the Heineken Young Scientists Awards 2024, the YERUN Open Science, and the 2022 EST Young Scholar Prize. She has acted as an evaluator of academic programs at the BA and MA levels, including for the Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education - A3ES, as well as part of the selection process of MA translation programs at the European level for the European Commission’s European Master's in Translation (EMT) network. She has acted as a peer-reviewer for major journals (Perspectives, Translation and Interpreting Studies), publishers (Routledge) and academic conferences (EST, EAMT, MT Summit) in the field of Translation Studies. She has supervised several BA and MA projects to successful completion, and she is currently supervising Ph.D. funded projects on healthcare communication. For further details, see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5461-2078 and https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/s.-valdez/publications#tab-2.