Isabel Rocha is Pro-rector for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at NOVA University of Lisbon in Portugal and Principal Investigator at ITQB NOVA, from the same University. She did her PhD at Minho University, Portugal in Chemical and Biological Engineering and a Post-Doc at the Technical University of Denmark. Isabel does her research in Biotechnology covering the topics of Metabolic Engineering and Systems and Synthetic Biology and has published over 140 full papers in international journals, books and international conferences. She is the Principal Investigator of several projects and is involved in collaboration projects with research institutions worldwide. She is the Scientific Coordinator of the Shikifactory100 Project (Shikifactory100.eu) and the national representative in the board of the European Infrastructure for Bioinformatics (ELIXIR). She is also an evaluator of several funding agencies, including the European Commission.
During 2007 she was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, as part of the MIT-Portugal Program. She was, from 2007 to 2017, part of the MIT-Portugal faculty, being in charge of a Portuguese educational program in innovation involving 4 universities and 2 PhD programs – the i-teams program. She was the President of P-Bio, the Portuguese Bioindustries Association and she was also one of the founders of the company Biotempo and is the founder and scientific coordinator of SilicoLife, a company that won several national prizes in entrepreneurship and is involved in major industrial biotechnology projects worldwide.