Rita Ferreira is a Research Scientist at KAUST in the research group of Prof. Diogo Gomes, within the CEMSE Division. Rita received her dual Ph.D. degree in Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA, and at the New University of Lisbon (UNL), Portugal, in 2011. She was supervised by Prof. Irene Fonseca (CMU) and Prof. Luísa Mascarenhas (UNL). Before joining KAUST in 2014, Rita was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Rita's research activities intersect applied and pure mathematics and are driven by applications to physical and socio-economic sciences and engineering. Her domain of specialization is based on variational and asymptotic techniques to study minimization problems and systems of PDEs arising in problems within material sciences, propagation of waves, mean-field games, and imaging.