Dr. Lopes-Cendes is a physician scientist, professor of Medical Genetics and head of the laboratory of Molecular Genetics at the department of Medical Genetics, School of Medical Sciences, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. She obtained her M.D. degree at UNICAMP, followed by specialty training in pediatrics. She obtained her M. Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Neuroscience at McGill University, Canada. She works in the field of neurogenetics, focusing on the study of genetic and phenotypic markers in neurologic disorders, such as epilepsy, Huntington disease, spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs), familial spastic paraplegia, and stroke. In recent years, her laboratory has focused on the use of new genomic techniques and currently, her laboratory is a reference in Latin America for next generation sequencing technologies, bioinformatics analysis of complex genomic data and non-coding RNAs. Dr. Lopes-Cendes has received several honors and awards for her scientific contributions, and she is an elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.