Full Professor at the Computer Engineering Department of the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon (UL), and researcher at INESC-ID, and Vice-President of FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology.
He has been a professor at IST since 2012, where, in addition to his teaching and research activity, he has held several academic and scientific management positions.
He taught a wide range of subjects in the different study cycles and was awarded the prize for excellence in teaching in all the years he taught at IST.
Holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from the Free University of Brussels (Institute of Artificial Intelligence, IRIDIA-ULB, 2007). He was Senior Researcher (Chargé de Recherches, FRS-FNRS) in the Machine Learning group (MLG-ULB) of the same Belgian university, and Assistant Researcher at the Center for Artificial Intelligence of FCT/NOVA.
His research focuses on understanding collective phenomena that occur from the cellular level to human behavior. He has addressed problems such as the evolution of cooperation and social norms, the modeling of climate agreements and their institutions, and the role of technology and social networks in cooperation between humans, among others. These issues are addressed by developing and combining techniques from fields such as artificial intelligence, mathematical biology, experimental economics, and statistical physics.