Elisabete Alves graduated in Psychology in 2005 and completed a PhD in Public Health in July 2012, both from the U. Porto, in Portugal. In August 2012 she was awarded a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Public Health of University of Porto, Portugal, being selected through a process of open competition and evaluation. This achievement marked a promising career with an interdisciplinary orientation in the field of social sciences. In 2015 she was awarded with a new post-doctoral fellow, in the field of Psychology. During her PhD, she chose to study the cardiovascular risk profile of mothers of the cohort, before and during pregnancy, and 4 years after delivery. This ground-breaking work emphasized pregnancy as a privileged life event to implement coherent and effective strategies of health promotion and disease prevention in order to optimize women’s current and future health, resulting in several publications in international indexed journals and media coverage. This work also revealed different trajectories according to socio-economic position, stressing the importance of studying, in depth, the effects of social adversity on health in women and men during transition to parenting, which is essential for the implementation of citizen-centred policies in science and health. She has participated in several projects in the field of Social Studies of Science, Public Health and Psychology, and has published more than 25 papers in reputed international peer-reviewed journals, has been serving as reviewer of renowned journals and participated in several conferences and academic degrees jury. Since her PhD, she has been the responsible for the supervision of Master and PhD thesis.

Elisabete Alves is part of the Department of Health and Society of the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP) and develops her research in the field of the social determinants of health, combining knowledge from public health, epidemiology and social sciences. She is interested in understanding the experiences and perspectives of those who are caring for someone, as well as the impact of such experience on their psychosocial health. Taking into account the specific context of motherhood and parenthood among parents of very preterm infants, she is interested in studying the impact of experiencing a very preterm delivery on prematurity awareness, attitudes towards parenthood and psychological health and well-being of mothers and fathers, contributing to understand how psychological and socio-demographic characteristics intertwine in health outcomes after an adverse life event.