Leonor Maria is currently a researcher in Centro de Quimica Estrutural-Instituto Superior Técnico of Universidade de Lisboa. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 2003 from the Technical University of Lisbon (IST – Instituto Superior Técnico) with the work in uranium coordination chemistry. Between 2003 and 2007, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry Group of ITN. In September 2007, L. Maria moved to the Centro de Química Estrutural-IST to work on structural analysis of metallic complexes with NMR techniques. In September 2009 she came back to ITN as an Assistant Researcher under the FCT contract program Ciência 2008 to work in the f-Element Chemistry Group . Until the end of 2019 she was a member of the f-Element Chemistry Group of C2TN at IST (ITN was integrated at IST in 2012). Since January 2020 she is a member of the Inorganic and Organometallic Architectures Reactivity and Catalysis (IOARC) Group of Centro de Química Estrutural (CQE) of IST. L. Maria’s main research interests focus on fundamental aspects of the synthesis, reactivity, bonding and structure of lanthanide and actinide molecular complexes. This involves the design of ligands for supporting metal molecular complexes that can be involve in multi-electron transfer reactions, chemical transformations and metal-ligand multiple bond formation. Her research program combine air- and moisture sensitive synthetic techniques with multinuclear NMR, electronic absorption, infrared, single crystal X-ray diffraction analysis and mass spectrometry to prepare and characterize compounds.