Laura Cerqueira has held the PhD in Biomedical Eng. in 2012 at UMinho. During PhD, she integrated the Biofilm Group to develop methods for pathogens detection based on Nucleic Acid Mimics (NAMs). Particularly one, related with the detection of Helicobacter pylori in gastric biopsies, gained more attention by its innovative potential. The result of this research let her to co-found a start-up, Biomode, intended to market proprietary PNA-FISH kits. Since then, her scientific career is focused on translational research to answer industrial needs on pathogens control combining research at LEPABE (UPorto) and technology transfer. At Biomode she have worked firstly for 20 months, to set the company operations, and then later (2015-2018), as Chief Operations Officer, leveraging international regulatory validation of the food products for detecting Salmonella (certificate nº 031804), Listeria (nº111701) and Cronobacter (nº081702) by AOAC, and the CE mark for the clinical method (H. pylori). Still, she was maintaining collaboration with LEPABE, as Postdoc (2013-2015) in Biofilm Engineering Lab (BEL), and as junior researcher (2015-2019). During these periods, her scientific activity dealt with FISH methods improvement for food and environmental industry applications and on the miniaturized devices for the quasi-real detection of bacteria (LEPABE and CEFT). These studies are still ongoing. In 2019, she decided to come back to LEPABE to expand her research field. To raise funding to support her studies, she obtained funding as Principal Researcher, from a FCT project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029961; 2018-2022) where a method for Legionella pneumophila (LP) monitoring was developed in collaboration with INIAV (PT). This project was the basis for Laura to demonstrate her research independence on the use of PNA probes to assess Legionella pneumophila gene expression within multispecies biofilms in water systems.  At 2022 she was awarded with the high impact CBE Young Investigator award as a recognition of her work on the application of PNA-FISH based-methods for bacterial detection and localization in biofilms. She focused on writing an ERA Chair (Horizon2030) project intending to create a group of Excellence on Engineered Biofilms at LEPABE (PI Prof Nuno Azevedo; ERA Chair Dra. Darla Goeres). Since 2023 she held an Assistant Researcher position. Additionally, she is taking part of other projects, such as the COST Action CA20110 exRNA, as member of the Management Committee.