Maria Helena Santos is an associate member of CIS-Iscte, where she was a postdoctoral researcher between 2012 and 2018 with a grant from FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). She holds a bachelor's degree (2001), master's degree (2004) and PhD (2011) in Social and Organisational Psychology from Iscte, with a grant from FCT. 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-Iscte. She was 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 measures, specifically in markedly male-dominated professional contexts (e.g., politics and medicine) and female-dominated professional contexts (e.g., nursing and primary education) in order to understand how gender influences the dynamics of tokenism, i.e., the experiences and reactions of women in ‘men's worlds’ and men in ‘women's worlds’. In recent years, she has broadened her research, seeking to adopt an intersectional approach.