Maria Helena Santos is currently an integrated member of the CIS-IUL, where she was a post-doctoral researcher between 2012 and 2018. She has a degree (2001), a master's degree (2004) and a PhD (2011) in Social and Organizational Psychology from ISCTE-IUL. During the first three years of her postdoctoral project, she worked at the Centre en Études Genre LIEGE, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and at CIS-IUL. She has been coordinator of the Gender, Sexualities and Intersectionality Thematic Line between 2017 and 2019 and co-coordinator of the Psychange research group between 2018 and 2021.

Maria Helena Santos' research interests have focused on gender studies and affirmative action, specifically in the markedly masculine (e.g. politics and medicine) and feminine (e.g. nursing and basic education) professional contexts in order to understand how gender influences the tokenism dynamics, i.e. the experiences s and reactions of women in " men's worlds " and men in " women's worlds ".