Isabel Rocha is Vice-Rector at NOVA University Lisbon, coordinating the areas of research, innovation and value creation.
She is Principal Investigator at ITQB NOVA, coordinating a Research Laboratory in Systems and Synthetic Biology. She obtained her PhD at the University of Minho in Chemical and Biological Engineering and did a post-doctorate at the Technical University of Denmark. Her research in Biotechnology covers the topics of Bioinformatics, Metabolic Engineering, Synthetic Biology and Systems Biology, and she has published more than 140 complete articles in international magazines, books and conferences. She is the scientific coordinator, among others, of the Shikifactory100 Project (Shikifactory100.eu) and the national representative on the executive board of the European Bioinformatics Infrastructure (ELIXIR). She is also an evaluator for several funding agencies, including the European Commission.
During 2007, she was a visiting professor at MIT, USA, as part of the MIT-Portugal Program and, from 2007 to 2017, she was part of the faculty at MIT-Portugal, being responsible for an educational innovation program involving 4 universities and 2 PhD programs - the i-teams. She was President of P-Bio, Portuguese Association of Bioindustries and is one of the founders of the companies Biotempo and SilicoLife.
She is Chairman of the Board of the CoLab InnovPlantProtect, in crop protection, and Vice-Chairman of the CoLab BIOREF in Biorefineries, and is also a member of the Board of Directors of Madan Parque, NOVA's technology-based incubator.