Alexandra Castilho joined the Department of Applied Genetics and Cell Biology in 2004 and is currently heading the Plant Glycoengineering research group at the Institute of Plant Biotechnology and Cell Biology, BOKU, Vienna, Austria. Until 2018, she was the scientific coordinator of the Laura Bassi Center of Expertise on “Production of glycan-optimized biopharmaceuticals in plants” at the same institute.  
 
After completing her PhD at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK, she worked at the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica (ITQB) Oeiras, Portugal and at the Department of Genetics, School of Agriculture (ISA), University of Lisbon, Portugal.  
 
Her main research interests are the production of high-value recombinant (glyco)proteins in plants and the study of the impact of glycosylation in protein-protein interactions. She has developed a technology that uses tobacco (Nicotiana benthamiana) transgenic plants as expression hosts for the production of therapeutic or diagnostic proteins with “humanized” glycosylation. Within Plant Molecular Farming (PMF), her research niche specialized in plant glycoengineering has greatly contributed to the establishment of plants as alternative protein manufacturing platforms with unique advantages compared with conventional technologies.