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Lisandra Meneses, a distinguished scientist, has started as a professor at the Chair of Bioeconomy Technologies at the Institute of Forestry and Engineering, Estonian University of Life Sciences. Meneses, the 2020 winner of the L’Oréal "Women in Science" program, is recognized for her achievements in the field of biotechnology.

Lisandra Meneses is originally from Portugal but has been overseas for the past 9 years. She came to Estonia for the first time in 2015 with the program Erasmus+ traineeships, and later in 2016 she started her doctoral studies with Prof. Timo Kikas in the Bioenergy and Biofuels Workgroup. During her PhD studies, Lisandra studied different strategies for sidestreams varlorization from second-generation bioethanol production.

After concluding her studies, Lisandra left Estonia for pursing a postdoctoral position in the University of Alberta in Canada, which was followed by another position in the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. In the Middle East, she was promoted to Senior Researcher and in January 2024 was recognized as one of 60 impactful women in Middle East in 2024 in sustainability, climate innovation, and leadership (BCG V60 Award) by the American Company Boston Consulting Group. Later she moved to Poland where she was offered the position of Associate Professor at Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences.

Recently, Lisandra was awarded a research grant by the Estonian Research Council in the value of 144 000 EUR and decided to return to the workgroup of Prof. Timo Kikas as a visiting professor. In her project, Lisandra will study the utilization of liquid by-products from hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) for the production of value-added products utilizing purple phototrophic bacteria and anaerobic digestion. This project aims to find alternative solutions for handling the high amount of liquid by-products that are generated in the HTC process, since they are also very harmful to the environmental and challenging to handle.