Susana Vinga

Susana Vinga is currently associate professor at Instituto Superior Técnico/Universidade de Lisboa (IST/ULisboa) at the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) and the Dept. of Bioengineering (DBE). She is a Senior Researcher at INESC-ID in the Information and Decision Support Systems lab. She received a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (1999) and a PhD in Biology/Bioinformatics at ITQB/Univ. Nova de Lisboa (2005). Before this position, she was Principal Investigator (Investigador FCT) at IDMEC. Susana was part of the Board of Directors at INESC-ID between 2021 and 2023 and is a Senior Editorial Board Member of BMC Bioinformatics, a top journal in Mathematical and Computational Biology, PLoS ONE, and Genes.

She has successfully coordinated as Principal Investigator several national projects and participated in several national and European projects as a team member and work package leader in the areas of Biotechnology and Computational Biology. Since January 2021, she is the PI of the European H2020 Twinning project OLISSIPO - Fostering Computational Biology Research and Innovation in Lisbon, which aims to strengthen INESC-ID/IST research profile in Computational Biology. By promoting several training activities in this area, OLISSIPO contributed to leverage the skills of Early-Stage Researchers in Portugal and around Europe.

Publications
She has published in high-impact journals, achieving a Google h-index=29 with more than 4355 citations. Among main achievements in the development of methods for Genomics, she coined the area of alignment-free biological sequence analysis and comparison in a review, which is one of the most cited paper in Portugal in Computer Science. Susana wrote a book chapter on Biological sequence analysis by vector-valued functions.

In 2021, she integrated the Stanford’s list of the World’s top 2% most-cited researchers in 2021 via Elsevier.

Awards
In 2010, she was granted the Young Research Award of the Technical University of Lisbon, and in 2017 and 2022, she was awarded the Scientific Award from Universidade de Lisboa/CGD in the area of Computer Science and Engineering for the impact of her publications.