Affiliated with Universidade do Algarve, and at CEFAGE Research Center, she is also the President of KIPT Colab, the first and unique colab in tourism in Portugal. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Algarve (Portugal), a Master's from ISEG, University of Lisbon (Portugal), a PhD from the University of Algarve in tourism demand (Portugal) and aggregation from the University of Algarve, all relating to tourism and hospitality management. She has published a wide range of articles in top-tier journals such as (Annals, TM, JTR, IJHM, and JTTM, among others), conference papers in more than 40 countries and chapter books released by Elsevier, Routledge, CABI, Emerald, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She is an editorial board member of JTR, JBR, Anatolia, TA, and IJCTHR. In addition, she served as an ad-hoc reviewer for many other tourism, hospitality and leisure journals. She is also involved in several tourism-based national and international research projects, particularly with her partners based in Europe. Developing such partnerships has resulted in the publishing of quality journal papers, conference presentations and book chapters. She was also invited as a guest lecturer in STHM, Hong Kong Polytechnic, Stonehill College, Easton, MA, USA, and at Cartagena University; at the international level, at a national level, she collaborates with ISEG, Aveiro University, IPL and ESHTE.
She has also organized conferences or acted as part of the scientific committee worldwide in ATMC and CPTHL. Her work has received over one hundred citations in ISI-referenced journals and over one thousand citations counted by Google Scholar. Recently, she was ranked among the top 100 tourism researchers in terms of the number of publications from 1975-2014 (McKercher, 2015) and nominated as an outstanding reviewer by Emerald (2014), among other awards and recognitions. Her research interests entail tourism consumer behaviour, marketing, and image. Tourism economics and models are also some of her research passions.