Marcela Uliano da Silva is a Senior Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and an Associate Professor II at Nord University, Norway. A genome biologist in the Tree of Life Programme, she works to uncover still-unknown mechanisms of genome evolution across the Tree of Life. Her research focuses on understanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype through the evolution of genic and repetitive genomic content, and on reconstructing ancestral chromosomes to explore genome plasticity and constraint through evolutionary time. Marcela has also developed pipelines for high-quality organelle genome assembly. She is a TED Fellow, where she promotes science to the public, and co-chairs the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee of the Earth BioGenome Project, where, among other things, she advocates for the leadership and protagonism of scientists from the Global South in global biodiversity genomics initiatives.