Dr. Leonilde Varela is Assistant Professor at the Department of Production and Systems, and an integrated member of the Algoritmi Research Centre since 2012, at the University of Minho, Portugal.

She has a degree in Production Engineering from the University of Minho, in 1994, completed a Masters in Computer Integrated Production at DPS-UMinho in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Production and Systems at DPS-Minho in 2007.

She has been working in this department since 1994, through teaching and research activities, and she has also been collaborating in management tasks, namely regarding the coordination of the industrial management and systems subgroup that she integrates since 1994, and did coordinate from 2012 to 2021.

She did integrate the steering committee of the master's course in systems engineering, between 2016 and 2019, and is currently the director of the master's course in engineering and quality management, both at DPS-UMinho.

Her main research interests are in Manufacturing Management, Collaborative Management, Production Planning and Control, Optimization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Meta-heuristics, Scheduling, Web-based Systems, Services, and Technologies, mainly for supporting Engineering and Production Management, Collaborative Networks, Decision Making Models, Methods and Systems, and Virtual, Distributed and Networked Enterprises. She is a co-author in 2 books and has co-edited 4 books and one special issue in WoS/ Scopus indexed international scientific journal, being 3 more currently ongoing, along with an additional book edition. She did also publish more than 200 refereed scientific papers in indexed international conferences and books and journals. She coordinates research projects, which includes 2 concluded Ph.D. projects, and 6 other ones ongoing. She has also successfully supervised more than 70 MSc projects, and more than 15 are currently ongoing, in the area of Production and Systems Engineering, namely concerning the development of collaborative management models, methods, and tools, along with traditional decision approaches, and web-based platforms and systems, further based on AI approaches.

She has also been collaborating as a research member in several R&D projects, with national and international industrial enterprises and institutions, and further also in international Erasmus projects.

She is a member of several international institutions and research groups, such as the Machine Intelligence Research Labs - Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence (MirLabs), where she is a publication chair, and she has been integrating organizing and scientific committees in several international conferences and serves as a reviewer in more than 10 indexed international scientific journals. Moreover, she is also a member of other institutions and research groups, such as the Euro Working Group of Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS), in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); in the Industrial Engineering N), and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).