Leonor Bettencourt Rodrigues, completed an FCT funded PhD degree in Social, Environmental and Community Psychology in 2013, in ISCTE/IUL, and graduated in Social Psychology in 2004, in ISCTE/IUL. For more than 15 years, she has been involved in national and international action- research projects, that generically addressed social policy and intervention towards vulnerable groups (e.g., children), family and parenthood. Between 2017 and 2019, she won a competitive FCT post- doctoral research grant devoted to the integration of sociological and social policy perspectives and methodologies to study the complexity and ambivalence involved in the decision making about out- of-home placement for at-risk children.

She is a member of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) and of its ‘Child Maltreatment Data Collection’ working group. She was recently appointed national delegate and member of the management committee of the COST Action Euro-CAN – Multi-Response Sectorals to Child Abuse and Neglect in Europe: Incidence and Trends (CA19106), which aims to create and boost international networks in order to promote the development of a rigorous, consistent and comparable methodology for monitoring maltreatment data in European countries. Within this Cost Action, she also has the role of coordinating the working group on Definition and operationalisation of child maltreatment (consensus process of shared definitions).