Sónia Carabineiro graduated in Applied Chemistry (branch of Biotechnology) at the NOVA School of Science and Technology (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Portugal (FCT-UNL) and obtained her Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering (Catalysis) in 2001 at the same University. In 2000 she was an Invited Researcher at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and Post Doctoral Researcher from 2001 to 2003 at the same University. In 2004 she got a Post Doc grant at the Centre of Structural Chemistry of the University of Lisbon (CQE-IST). In 2007 she joined the Laboratory of Catalysis and Materials (LCM), part of Associate Laboratory LSRE-LCM, at the Department of Chemical Engineering (DEQ) of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), as an Assistant Researcher, with a Ciencia 2007 grant from Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). From 2013 to 2018 she was a Principal Researcher (Investigador FCT grant) at the same lab. She was Integrated Researcher of CQE-IST and Invited (Visiting) Professor at Wuhan Textile University, China in 2019.

She is now Assistant Professor at FCT-UNL (since 2020). She has also collaborations with other Universities of Portugal and abroad and is member of the Editorial Board of ChemCatChem journal. She is one the females reviewer in the world with more revisions done (Publons data) and evaluator of several international projects (including ERC grants). She was included in the list of the worldwide most cited scientists (top 2% of Chemistry) published by Stanford University since 2017. She was also chosen as one of the Portuguese Women in Science featured in the 4th Edition of the Book "Mulheres na Ciência" from Ciência Viva, Portugal in 2023.