Dr Mariana Pinto da Costa is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT), a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry (WHO Collaborating Centre for Mental Health Services Development and a NIHR Global Health Group) at Queen Mary University of London, and a Lecturer at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences Abel Salazar, at the University of Porto in Portugal. She also has clinical and research experience in Africa, where she was screening alcohol, smoking and other substances involvement, in primary and mental health care users in Luanda, while studying for the International Master on Mental Health Policy and Services at the New University of Lisbon supported by the WHO. She is enthusiastic in making the most of technology to connect people across the world. In her current research, she has been exploring views of different stakeholders (mental health professionals, volunteers and patients) about the potential of social relationships between people with severe mental illness and volunteers through different formats (face-to-face or using technology) in different European countries. She developed a new digital volunteering intervention - the Phone Pal - that connects patients and volunteers in the community through smart-phones, which she tested in a trial. She was nominated by Columbia University as one of the Top 100 Innovative Women Leaders in Global Mental Health. During her medical studies in the University of Porto she studied abroad for two years (in Italy and Poland), and won a prize from the European Commission “Erasmus Student 2 million - Erasmus, Success Stories”. She kept passionate about mobility and collaborated with the European Commission writing the Erasmus+ Generation Declaration, which she presented at the European Parliament discussing the future of this program. She is past president of the European Federation of Psychiatric trainees (EFPT), and has been the Chief Investigator and study manager of the EFPT Brain Drain Study, researching mobility experiences of psychiatric trainees in 33 European countries. She is currently Chair of the Early Career Psychiatrists Committee at the European Psychiatric Association and Chair of the Early Career Psychiatrists Section at the World Psychiatric Association.