Rode Veiga-Pfeifer studied German and Spanish at the RWTH-Aachen-University and at the University of Duisburg-Essen before completing the additional qualification German as a Second Language/Intercultural Education. After her studies, she worked as a teacher of German Linguistics, German as a Foreign Language, as well as Brazilian Portuguese at various universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. Currently, she is doing her PhD in the field of Contrastive Linguistics (German-Portuguese) and in Foreign Language Acquisition Research. Her work focuses on language comparisons and on the linguistic analysis of German learner texts. At the Mercator Institute, she has been working in the continuing education programme German as a Second Language.