I graduated in Microbiology in 2002 at UCP, Porto, Portugal (1st of 46 students), joining Serrano lab, EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany, in 2003 where I met my PhD supervisors, Joost Schymkowitz and Frederic Rousseau, Switch Laboratory, VIB-VUB, Brussels, Belgium (now VIB-KUL, Leuven, Belgium). My PhD thesis on Biophysics – Bioengineering, funded by Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (BIF, Germany, 2004-2006) and the Portuguese Science Funding Agency (FCT, 2006-2009), led to 3 high impact articles and a patented fibril disassembly method, with my PhD. defense having been awarded the rank of “Greatest Distinction” (top grade).

My postdoctoral activities (2009-2013), supported by a competitive European Union Marie Curie fellowship (2009-2011) and FCT (2011-2013), dealt with dengue virus capsid protein, supervised by Nuno C. Santos, IMM-FMUL, Lisbon, Portugal & Andrea da Poian,  UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where part of my post-doctoral work was conducted. Among other distinctions, I was awarded the Gulbenkian Frontiers Research Prize (€ 50.000), a prestigious prize for autonomous research by postdoctoral fellows, with good results: 7 articles, 3 awards to me and 2 to my students, >20 media articles and a patented dengue virus inhibitor.

I started a competitive “Investigador FCT” position on January 2014, at IMM, Lisbon, Portugal, to work on protein-ligand interactions. I obtained independent funding, supervised students, purchased equipment and organized workshops. I attracted talented PhD students, initiated 3 international collaborations, published 4 top articles (3 as senior author), leading to the Hans Neurath Outstanding Promise Award in 2015 and a Protein Society Honorary Membership. In 2015 alone, my students received 4 prizes and gave 3 oral presentations, demonstrating my leadership skills and ability to secure good results for my team and me.

As a PI, I established collaborations with Sebastian Maurer-Stroh and Peter Bond, Bioinformatics Institute, Singapore, Charlotte Hauser, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, Singapore and Carsten Kötting, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.  In 2017, together with two PhD students, I co-founded DART Diagnostics, a startup company based on a technology originaly conceived and developed in-house via our work. My publications can be found at Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.pt/citations?user=VCMp9iEAAAAJ&hl=pt-PT&oi=sra), ORCID (0000-0002-9284-8599) and ResearcherID (G-2534-2013) databases.