Ana Ardá carried out her doctoral studies at the Marine Natural Products Chemistry group at the University of A Coruña, for which she got two competitive fellowships (Xunta de Galicia and Diputación de A Coruña). With the aim of steering her research towards the field of chemical biology, she then joined the group of Bioorganic Chemistry at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research in Utrecht, a world leading group in the field of carbohydrates. Within the EU project EUROCarbDB, she had the opportunity to redirect her research interests into the field carbohydrates, with a special focus on their structure and the relation with biological significance. After a fruitful collaboration during her posdoc with the group of Prof Jiménez-Barbero, at that time at CIB-CSIC, Madrid, she joined his group at the end of 2008, with the aim of deepen and strengthen her expertise in the characterization of molecular recognition processes by NMR. From the period 2009-2012 she got the competitive Juan de la Cierva Fellowship. In this period she had the opportunity to get involved in a wide range of research projects, most of them through international collaborations. The scientific productivity of this period involved more than 20 publications in first quartile, including two JACS, Acc. Chem. Res., Chem. Commum., Chem. Sci., and 15 Chemistry, among others. In 2014 she moved with the group of Prof. JiménezBarbero to CIC bioGUNE in Bilbao. In 2015 she got the competitive Ramón y Cajal Fellow position, which allowed focusing her career in Chemical Glycobiology, in particular in deciphering the factors that modulate glycan recognition in Nature, with special emphasis in processes of proven biological or biomedical relevance.