Rita Capela main research interest is in the medicinal chemistry area and in the discovery of innovative drugs with pharmaceutical activity, mainly in malaria treatment, which remains one of the most severe public health problems worldwide. During her PhD she developed antimalarial drugs based on an endoperoxide scaffold (artemisinin) applied using a hybrid drug design approach. The design of these hybrid compounds was a breakthrough, as the ability to target the liver and the blood stages of malaria parasites opened new opportunities to treat and eliminate malaria. From this pioneer approach four papers were published in journals of high scientific relevance and several international and national collaborations were stablished. After her PhD, she continues developing hybrid drugs with different pharmaceutical application than malaria, as leishmaniasis but mainly directed to cancer treatment, based on the linkage of the endoperoxide scaffold (artemisinin and synthetic endoperoxides) to other chemical entities. Endoperoxides are unique chemical tools to interrogate ferrous iron-dependent biology, as ferroptosis, an iron-dependent cell death. She developed skills in analytical methods development during some years in industry, and she perform stability assays by HPLC in several media in the group. Rita Capela main motivation is the design of hybrid molecules based on endoperoxides or other chemical entities to develop novel multi-target drugs and probes to uncover the underlying action mechanisms in several diseases.