Joana Baptista is an Assistant Professor at the ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon. Her research focuses on the early relational determinants of child development, particularly the quality of caregiver-child interactions. In recent years, she has concentrated on understanding the impact of early adverse experiences, with a special emphasis on how deprived parental care affects children's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning. She is the Principal Investigator of the project All4Children – The Integrated Model of Family Foster Care to Promote High-Quality Child Welfare Practices in Portugal, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (2022.03592.PTDC). Her work also explores how the quality of mother- and father-child interactions shapes executive functioning in infants and preschoolers, both in typically developing children and those born preterm. Joana Baptista has published extensively in leading journals and serves on the editorial board of Infant Behavior & Development.