Emilia Mendes was awarded, in 1999, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (UK). She then initiated a full-time academic career, carrying out research within the areas of Empirical Software Engineering and Web Engineering. The research areas in which she has focused the most are Software & Web effort estimation, evidence-based software engineering, value-based software engineering, and human-centric software engineering. She has to date published more than 230 research publications, which include 63 journals papers and two books as sole author. She has been a PC member in more than 220 conferences & workshops, and editorial board member of some of the leading journals in the field of Software Engineering. Currently she is an editorial board member of the Information and Software Technology and the ACM Computing Surveys journals. In 2023 she was ranked #20 in the list of top Computer Science Scientists in Sweden; and has been included in the list of top 2% scientists in the world based on career citations, for all the releases of a publicly available database of top-cited scientists. Prior to relocating to Aarhus to work as a Full Professor in Software Engineering at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Aarhus University, she worked for 11 years as a Full Professor in Computer Science at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden), combined with 4 years as a Distinguished Professor in Software Engineering at Oulu University (Finland). Finally, Emilia worked as a software practitioner for 10 years in Brazil, prior to carrying out her PhD studies in the UK.