Mariana Pinho is at Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biologica, a research institute from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Since 2006, she heads the Bacterial Cell Biology Laboratory where her group aims to understand the complex organization of bacterial cells, focusing on the temporal and spatial regulation of bacterial cell division and morphogenesis, as well as to integrate this information for a better understanding of antibiotic resistance mechanisms in the gram-positive pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. Therefore, two main lines of work coexist in the research group (i) fundamental studies of S. aureus cell division and cell cycle progression and (ii) studies of the mode of action of antimicrobial compounds and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in S. aureus.