Rute has been working as a senior researcher for 11 years, and as an engineer for 20 years. She is a hands-on person with an entrepreneurial mind. What motivates her is to introduce new, forefront ideas in the context of networking, and assist them in becoming operational and relevant to the technological community as well as to society, based on validation and implementation, as well as standardization.

In 2013, she founded Senception Lda, a startup dedicated to family safety based on non-intrusive pervasive technology.

During the last 7 years, Rute has been splitting her time across knowledge development, technology transfer, as well as team management. Currently, she is a Senior Researcher and the Director of COPELABS - Association for the Research and Development of Cognition and People-centric Computing. Since 2010, she is also an Associate Professor at University Lusofona.

Rute holds a PhD in Informatics (2004, summa cum laude) by the Univ. of Lisbon, having developed her thesis work as a visiting Scholar first at ICAIR, Northwestern University (2000), Evanston, IL, and then at Pennsylvania University (2000-2003), Philadelphia, PA.

Her independent research career started in 2004, in Siemens AG Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany where she worked until 2007, having joined Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH, Munich, in that year. During that period, her research interests related with fixed-mobile convergence; IPv6; advanced routing paradigms in the context of carrier-grade Ethernet. She worked at INESC Tec (2007-2010) as a senior researcher and Internet Architectures area focusing on wireless networks: user-centric networking; fixed-mobile convergence; advanced routing paradigms. Her research interests are: IoT (pervasive sensing platforms and middleware); social Internet design (network dynamics, user-centricity, self-organization; advanced routing paradigms); mobility modeling and management (fixed-mobile convergence).In 2013, she co-founded Senception lda.

Rute holds 9 patents and over 40 peer-reviewed publications in her fields of expertise.