Rita qualified as a radiation therapist (RTT) in 2008 in Lisbon (ESTeSL), where she is originally from. She immediately started working at Hospital de Santa Maria and completed an MSc programme in 2011. In 2012, she embraced a new challenge and moved to London. Since then, she has had the opportunity to work in dosimetry planning and on the treatment units at Mount Vernon Hospital. In 2015 she started working at the National Radiotherapy Trials Quality Assurance (RTTQA) group, which allowed her to specialise in sarcoma, lung and head and neck radiotherapy clinical trials. That experience has been crucial to developing her research plan in radiotherapy for soft tissue sarcoma of the extremities. In 201 she was awarded a doctoral research grant from the National Institute of Health Research and is conducting a part-time PhD, which allows her to conduct her own research project at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research in London. Her research is aimed at reducing radiotherapy toxicities in patients with soft tissue sarcoma. Rita has started also a part-time research and development role at the radiotherapy and proton beam departments at the University College London Hospitals in 2021.