​Dr. Sónia Negrão obtained her MSc. in "Agronomy- Crop Breeding" in 2002 at Instituto Superior de Agronomia in Portugal. She obtained her PhD degree at Instituto Tecnologia Química e Biológica- Universidade Nova de Lisboa (ITQB-NOVA) in Portugal, in 2008. Dr. Negrão's PhD was in rice breeding using marker-assisted selection, and undertaken in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute, Philippines. During her time as a post-doctoral fellow, at ITQB-NOVA, she characterized rice genetic variation in response to salinity. In 2013, Sónia became a research scientist at The Salt Lab in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. Since then, she has been involved in several projects related to high-throughput phenotyping, genomics and association mapping, as well as Big Data. She has an extensive list of international collaborators such as the International Rice Research Institute, AfricaRice, University of Adelaide, CIRAD, etc. She has the capacity to attract significant funding and to coordinate several national and international projects related to genetic variation, genomics and salinity tolerance. Dr. Negrão uses genomics to accelerate breeding and address problems related to climate change, and is focused on high quality science that will ultimately lead to sustainable crop improvement. ​