João Varela began his working carreer in 1985, having been invited as a monitor to support classes on Genetics at Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon from the fourth year of his Applied Plant Biology BSc degree until 1988. He obtained an MSc degree in Biotechnology, speciality Molecular Biology, at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 1990. In 1995, he earned his PhD degree at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He carried out pioneering work on the elucidation of the molecular response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to osmotic and salt stress, having identified for the first time that the genes involved in the response to salinity were also part of the response to thermal stress, namely the heat shock proteins HSP12, HSP26 and HSP70. He was hired as a postdoc at the Netherlands Institute of Oncology (NKI), but this work was interrupted when he was hired in 1998 to become an Auxiliary Professor at the University of Algarve (UALG) in the area of Genetics, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. Here he began his research on microalgae, in particular on Dunaliella salina and its response to stress through the accumulation of carotenoids in its chloroplast. He is a founding member of the Centro de Ciências do Mar do Algarve (CCMAR; ccmar.ualg.pt). Currently, together with Luísa Barreira, he leads the MarBiotech group at CCMAR, which focuses on Microalgae Biotechnology and participates as an active member and founder of the collaborative laboratory GreenColab (greencolab.com), which brings together academia and companies in a concerted effort to create qualified jobs and new products. He has participated in 30 competively funded projects and 2 research contracts. He is a member of the editorial boards of Algal Research, Marine Biotechnology, Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences and Marine Drugs. Recently, he became an Associate Professor in Biotechnology and was the director of Marine Biology MSc programme until 2021.