Margarida Souto-Carneiro was born in Lisbon, Portugal. In 1997, she graduated from the University of Lisbon, where she studied Biochemistry. After her residency, she studied the influence of programmed cell death defects in experimental arthritis at the Institute for Experimental Immunology of the University of Marburg (Germany) and then went on to the Institute of Pathology of the University of Würzburg (Germany) to study the role of synovial B lymphocytes in rheumatoid arthritis in the scope of her PhD; she received her degree in 2000. From 2001 to 2004, she had her post-doctoral training at the Autoimmunity Branch of the NIAMS/NIH (USA) and studied disease- and age-related changes in human gene recombination and in peripheral blood B lymphocyte subpopulations. In 2004, she joined the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência as a Marie Curie fellow and in 2005, she was bestowed the Young Investigator Award of the European League for Rheumatic Diseases. Since 2009, she has been the head of Immunology at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, where she conducts research on B lymphocyte biology. In 2010, she was selected as a council member for the International Union of Immunological Societies.