Vanda Lourenço is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, and a member of the NOVA Math research center, where she co-coordinates the thematic line Mathematics for Health and Biological Sciences (MatHBioS).

She is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualization (JDSSV) of the ISI International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC). She has also been active in several professional societies, including the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE), where she previously served on the Supervisory Board, and the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS), where she currently chairs the Country Representatives Committee and contributes to the Program and Nominations Committees.

Her research focuses on robust, nonparametric, and computational statistics, as well as machine learning, with applications to genetic and genomic association studies and the prediction of quantitative traits in plant and animal breeding. She has been involved in multiple national and international research projects and has published in peer-reviewed journals in these areas, with work spanning methodological developments and applications to real-world biological and health-related data.