He did his BSc (5 years) in plant biology at the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and his PhD research under the supervision of Antony Carr (University of Sussex, UK), where he worked with DNA damage checkpoints in fission yeast. His postdoctoral research was done under the supervision of Ruth Lehmann (Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York, USA), where he worked on the regulation of gene expression during Drosophila primordial germ cell segregation. He established his research group at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC) in 2006 and has since moved first to the University of Algarve, Portugal (where he got tenure) and recently to the University of Aveiro (Portugal).