A Synopsis of My Academic Career

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it." — Robert Heinlein in "Time Enough for Love"

• Summary of My Work
• Selected Publications
• Ph.D. Thesis
• CV
• Useful Links

The aim of my career is to help understand human aging, namely, help discover what causes aging. A summary of my work is available online. You can also browse through my most relevant academic publications and my CV.

Many people tend to see the world as a sea of problems. I tend to see it as a sea of solutions and opportunities waiting to be found. Even so, I know that achieving my goals is merely a collection of disappointments. To quote Winston Churchill: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

Presently, I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Lipper Center for Computational Genetics, part of the Church lab, affiliated with the Department of Genetics from Harvard Medical School. I use different methods and strategies to research aging combining experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches: gene networks and systems biology, evolutionary biology, comparative genomics, demographic studies, cellular models, and progeroid syndromes. My mentor is George Church.

As a doctoral fellow I worked at the The University of Namur — Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur, Belgium. Olivier Toussaint was my supervisor in the Ageing and Stress Group, part of the Research Unit on Cellular Biology. My research involved theoretical and experimental biology: from evolutionary models of aging, passing through the molecular mechanisms of cellular senescence and stress-induced senescence--such as the telomeres, gene expression, and Werner's syndrome--and ending in bioinformatics and genomics. The resulting thesis was entitled: "Modelling human ageing: role of telomeres in stress-induced premature senescence and design of anti-ageing strategies".

I was an undergraduate at the College of Biotechnology, Porto, Portugal, part of the Catholic University of Portugal, where I became a Licentiate in Microbiology. In my last year in college I was a research intern at the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology, part of University of Porto. I worked at the Human Genetics and Genetic Disorders on Machado-Joseph disease, a neurologic disorder. My advisor was Jorge Sequeiros.