Ana Cunha is a Research and Development Associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is also a University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute Fellow, working with the institute’s Radiopharmaceutical Therapies Convergent Research Initiative. 

Cunha’s research integrates theoretical chemistry, computational modelling, and spectroscopy, with a focus on quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics simulations, and excited states. Her doctoral research focused on modelling two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy of hydrogen-bonded systems. She previously studied combining multi-scaling and quantum mechanical methods. 

Cunha has held academic and research appointments across Europe and the United States. Between 2022 and 2025, she was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Antwerp, where she taught and supervised graduate students in quantum chemistry, retrosynthetic analysis, and advanced molecular dynamics. She also worked as a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2021–2022) and as a Domain Scientist at the SURF Dutch National Supercomputer Center (2020–2022). Earlier, she served as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Computational Science Division (2018–2019) and was a TCCM Erasmus Mundus Scholar at the Universities of Porto and Groningen (2011–2013).

Education