[3] She is also a member of the Management Board of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, of the World Health Organization Expanded Program on Immunization, among other international groups.

[3] After having collaborated with José Pereira Miguel in a research project, she was invited to become his assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon,[5] and filled the position for over twenty years, from 1995 to 2017.

[3][8] In a 2018 interview, Graça Freitas mentioned the 2003 SARS epidemic and the "profound anguish" until the causative agent, SARS-CoV, was identified, as the most complicated moment in her career at the Directorate-General of Health.

She has received criticism for her January 2020 remarks that the disease was no cause for alarm as "there is the smallest chance of person-to-person transmission" and, for that reason, considered "there [was] not a great likelihood such a virus [could] get to Portugal, as even in China the outbreak [had] been contained", calling concerns about a pandemic "a little bit excessive".

[9] This was before the first evidence of human-to-human contagion outside China emerged, and before the World Health Organization started to acknowledge these dynamics of transmission in late January and early February.

[3] In 2002, she received a Commendation (Louvor) from the Minister of Health António Correia de Campos, "taking into account the quality of her work regarding transmissible diseases in general and, in particular, those preventable by vaccination.

"[14] In 1985, she was similarly the recipient of a Commendation due to her work for Lisbon Regional Health Administration's Office for Epidemiology and Studies in containing the last diphtheria outbreak in the country.

[11] A smoker for over 20 years, she quit smoking in 2000[6] with the help of varenicline, motivated by Francisco George and by the increasing difficulty in climbing the steep incline of Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques to get to the offices of the Directorate-General of Health.

[6] She sleeps from 1 a.m. to half-past 5 a.m.[11] The stress of overseeing all matters of public health in Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she described as "running a marathon on the Everest", made her lose 5 to 6 kilograms in the first month after the start of the outbreak in the country.