Diogo Neves Proença is an Assistant Professor at the University of Algarve. He has an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and completed a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, with a specialty in Microbiology (pre-Bologna); both degrees were obtained from the University of Coimbra in 2008 and 2014, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow from FCT (2015-2019) in Biological Sciences - Microbiology. His Ph.D. and postdoctoral work was carried out in Portugal, USA, Brazil and Germany. He has completed several courses or workshops. Diogo was a Junior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Coimbra, and Curator at the University of Coimbra Bacteria Culture Collection (UCCCB), until August 2024. Diogo has published more than 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals (18 in the last 5 years), 1 article without a peer-reviewed journal, 4 book chapters, and 5 papers in proceedings of events. He has an h-index of 19 (Google Scholar), and an i10-index of 26. He serves as an Editor in 12 international scientific journals and has contributed as a reviewer for various international journals, holding editorial roles e.g. in Frontiers in Microbiology and Frontiers in Plant Science, and the prestigious International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. He was the founder and chair of the Newsletter Your Leadership Communication. He has been a reviewer for more than 15 international journals, in which he is Reviewer Editor for Frontiers in Microbiology and Frontiers in Plant Science. He belongs to the Editorial Board of Magazine da SPM and served on the Advisory Board of Cultures magazine (2013-2018). He organized or was part of the team of 11 events / conferences / workshops. He has actively participated in 47 international and national conferences, presenting 32 oral presentations and 34 poster presentations. He has received 29 awards or honors and has been involved in 21 research projects (National and Regional funds, FCT, European projects, COST Actions). Currently, his research topics are i) Bioprospecting of new bacterial compounds in circular economy perspective; ii) Environmental Microbiology focused on study of Microbiomes (endophytic, from frogs' skin, bees' gut, from soils); iii) Biological Control (nematicidal and fungicide roles); iv) Biodiversity and microbial ecology from diverse environments; v) Bacterial genome mining and Phylogenomics; and vi) Taxonomy (description of new bacterial species). Diogo has teaching experience with undergraduate and master classes at University of Algarve and at the University of Coimbra and he was trainer on Training School at CIHEAM-IAMB, Bari, Italy. He supervised 4 MSc dissertations, 10 BSc projects (2 ongoing), and have been mentored other BSc, MSc and PhD students. He was also member of juries to award research grants in the scope of scientific projects, member of a jury of masters, member of online jury of postdocs week, as well as member in juries in the selection of Young Ambassadors of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). At the University of Coimbra, he was member of the Projects and Interdisciplinarity Committee of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research. Diogo is member of Smart Waste Portugal Young Professionals. Diogo have been a member of the Portuguese Society of Microbiology since 2009 (Member of the Board since 2023) and of ASM since 2011. He is member of Microbiology Society of UK and Champion at the same society since 2024. Between 2013 and 2016 he has served as the ASM Young Ambassador of Science to Portugal. In that period, he contacted with several microbiology groups from North to South of Portugal, organized 4 workshops/conferences in Aveiro, Coimbra and Évora. He was Chair of the Young Leaders Circle of ASM (2016-2017) as well as a member of the Advisory Board of ASM (2016-2017).