Ana Pego obtained her undergraduate degree in Forensic Investigation, with a first-class honours, from Glasgow Caledonian University (in addition to an exchange period of 6 months at Tampere University of Applied Sciences), in 2012, where she has developed a final-year project on the properties of colloidal silver and their implementation for the production of antimicrobial polymers to be used in children's toys. After that, she decided to specialize in Forensic Toxicology and was awarded her masters degree from The University of Glasgow in 2013 where she graduated with merit and worked on evaluating different liquid-phase microextraction techniques (DISDME, LLLME and LPME) in forensic toxicology. After that, Ana has worked for companies such as Scientific Analysis Laboratories (nowadays Concept Life Sciences) and Charles River Laboratories. She has then decided to pursue her academic career and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo in 2018, after spending 3 months at the University of California, Los Angeles. During those 4 years, Ana has worked on investigating the relationship bewteen violent death, cocaine abuse and SNPs where she has worked with postmortem cases and analysed both hair and blood using GC-MS and LC-MS/MS with a variety of extraction techniques. That same year, Ana joined Avans University of Applied Sciences, where she concluded her Post-Doc in 2020, after working on a project entitled: 'SherLOK: profiling of individuals through forensic analysis and imaging of hair'. During that time she has spent 6 months as a visiting scholar at Maastricht University developing a MALDI-TOF method for the analysis of single hair strands to test for capsaicins. That same year of 2020, she started working for the Dutch Screening Group as Head of Development. Nowadays, Ana works as an Assistant Professor in the Sciences Deparment at John Jay college of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. 

Ana's line of research involve forensic toxicology with the development of new analytical procedures involving microextractions (such as LPME and QuEChERS), alternative matrices and novel psychoactive substances. She has a vast experience with hair analysis (both with LC-MS/MS and MALDI-TOF), postmortem toxicology, determination of drugs of abuse and method validation. 

Ana has presented in various international conferences and was an invited speaker in several occasions. She has won 4 different grants for both studying and presenting her work abroad.