Virgínia Henriques Calado is a social anthropologist, researcher at Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (Social and Cultural Anthropology) from the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (2012). She has a master's degree in Sociology (ISCTE) and a degree in Social Anthropology (ISCTE). She is a member of the research group Diversities: Ethnographies in the Contemporary World (ICS-ULisboa).

In her master's thesis - Social Construction of a Mountain Space - the Vision of Serra da Estrela from 1881 to the 1930s - she directed her attention on Serra da Estrela, seeking to identify and discuss the processes through which a space that was practically ignored in the 19th century came to be seen as a place to visit and frequent, especially from 1881 onwards. Gathering and analysing written documents and iconographic materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (collections of illustrated postcards from that period), she analysed, from a comprehensive perspective, the elements through which Serra da Estrela was social constructed and projected.

Her doctoral thesis, situated in the fields of the Anthropology of Food and Medical Anthropology, focused on food choices and alternative systems of understanding the world. That research crosses the aforementioned areas with the Anthropology of the Body, History, Sociology and Nutrition Sciences. Although this research is in a very different field from the research on Serra da Estrela, it also focuses on processes of knowledge construction, analysing, in this case, the way in which that processes shaped adherence to macrobiotics. The social process through which a worldview centred on macrobiotics was constructed, arising from the dynamic relationship between ideas and practices, as well as the way in which macrobiotics materialised and influenced social activity, caught her attention. For several years, in Braga and Lisbon, she carried out fieldwork to gain a deeper understanding of the adherence to macrobiotics. This research resulted in the book A Proposta Macrobiótica de Experiência do Mundo (2015), published by Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Between 2014-2019, as part of a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the FCT, she carried out the project: Policies that Knead Bread: Citizenship and Food Guidelines within the United Nations, a project centred on issues of food insecurity with field research in Mozambique (Nampula).

Although her main research focus is on the Anthropology of Food (alternative food movements, eating habits, food and health, food (in)security, food councils, nutrition policies and food programmes, ageing and food), her research interests cover a wide range of thematic and theoretical areas: social construction of space; vaccination; citizenship; public participation, analysis of political discourses, crises.

She has participated in various research projects and is currently part of the team working on the project Eating Matters: Challenges of an Inclusive, Healthy and Sustainable Food for Better Ageing (coordinated by Mabel Gracia and Cristina Larrea).

She was an assistant professor at the Piaget Institute, where she taught Anthropology and Sociology and supervised dozens of graduate students' final projects.  She was a member of the school's board of directors and held coordinating positions.

Keywords: Knowledge construction; Social Construction of Space; Non-conventional therapeutic systems; Food; Health; Body; Food choices; Macrobiotics; Food (in)security; Food policies; Food councils; Ageing and food, Crises.