Ana Luísa Garcia-Oliveira is a Portuguese Agronomic Engineer from ISA, University of Lisbon, with a MSc in Crop Genetics and Breeding from CAU, Beijing, China and PhD in Technologic, Molecular and Comparative Genetics from UTAD, Vila Real, Portugal and UCM, Madrid, Spain. Currently, she works at the Bioscience Centre, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria) focusing on maize molecular breeding. With experience in the three main cereal crops (Rice, Wheat and Maize) and a clonal crop (cassava), her research interests include quantitative genetics for important traits related to plant homeostasis, both from nutritional and plant stress adaptation point of view. With more than 10 grants along her professional experience she was distinguished with the Early Career Award 2014 from the IWGSC: International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, due to the discovery of the second functional marker for aluminium tolerance in hexaploid wheat. Currently, Ana Oliveira is involved in a very dynamic team of plant and molecular breeders and social economical scientists in the STMA project. Her main interests involve marker discovery and quantitative genetics for several traits affecting maize production in Africa, including MSV and Striga resistance, Low-N and aluminium tolerance as well improvement of nutritional traits such as Zn and phytate.