Dr Ferreira is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Porto University where he coordinates a Clinical Trial Unit mainly focused on Investihgator-Led Clinical trials. His main research interests are cardiac fibrosis, energetics, and autophagy. He has focused much of his career studying the impact of mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists in the human body, from cardiovascular risk to end-stage kidney disease.

Mafalda Bourbon, is a principal researcher at Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge where she is the coordinator of the R&D Unit and Head of the Cardiovascular Research Group at the Department of Health Promotion and Prevention of non-Communicable Diseases. She is also an Invited Associated Professor and co-Head of the Molecular Medicine in Dyslipidaemia and Diabetes Unit, at the Cardiovascular Center of the University of Lisbon, Faculdade de Medicina. She completed her PhD in Clinical Sciences in 2006 at Imperial College Faculty of Medicine. She also holds a MSc in Molecular Medicine by Imperial College London. She is the Chair of the Familial Hypercholesterolaemia Variant Curation Expert Panel at Clinical Genome Resource. She is involved in 2 large consortiums PerMedFH (coordinator) and FH EARLY (scientific lead and WP leader). Her main field of research is genetic dyslipidaemia with a special focus on Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (FH) developing and applying methods to identify, functionally characterize and interpret variants found in clinical FH patients and other dyslipidaemia patients. Her research also focuses on the identification of new genes/mechanisms for inherited hypercholesterolaemia.