Márcia Lourenço Baptista holds a PhD in Engineering Design and Advanced Engineering from MIT Portugal Program (Instituto Superior Técnico). She teaches different topics in big data analytics, data science, and machine learning. Main area of research is predictive analytics, explainable artificial intelligence and neural networks. She is interested in applying these techniques to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) both in the ocean and coastal studies as well as land development. She is the author of more than 45 scientific articles, most of which are classified in Quartile 1 or high-impact conferences. Before enrolling in NOVA IMS, she was an invited researcher in several international research centers such as NASA Research Center, ITA, National Institute of Informatics of Tokyo and Delft University of Technology.