Coordinator Researcher at CIES-Iscte – Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, University Institute of Lisbon. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), she examines how science and technology shape — and are shaped by — ideas of identity, risk, and governance.

In the fAIces project, Helena examines how facial recognition and emotion analysis technologies take shape and become sites of contestation — analysing the roles of scientists, tech companies, and activist networks in shaping debates over how computer vision “reads” human feelings. She explores how these systems move between contexts like security and healthcare, where they blur the line between care and surveillance and reconfigure social and political life in the age of AI.