(Chemical) Bonding is what makes life possible

I began my academic career in 2008 in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), under the supervision of Professor Maria João Ramos and Professor Pedro Fernandes. Initially as a master’s student, then as a PhD candidate, my research centered on employing computational chemistry tools to investigate enzyme catalysis and drug design. During this period, I undertook two extended research stays abroad. My PhD work was done in collaboration with the group of Professor Nino Russo, at the University of Calabria, in Italy, where I stayed for a period of one year. Following my PhD, I spent three months with Professor Hajime Hirao’s group at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In June 2016, I joined the group of Professor Dame Janet Thornton at the EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where I extended the scope of my research to bioinformatics. There, I developed the M-CSA (Mechanism and Catalytic Site Atlas), a unique database of enzyme mechanisms and catalytic sites which has more than 30 000 unique visitors, yearly. At the EBI, I also studied the evolution of enzymes and created a new software, called EzMechanism, that uses the knowledge stored in M-CSA to automatically propose enzyme mechanisms for a given enzyme active sites and reactions.

In July 2023, I have started an Auxiliary Researcher position funded by the FCT CEEC program, based at LAQV-REQUIMTE and FCUP. Alongside my research, I also supervise junior research students and teach in the Computational Biochemistry, Molecular Bioinformatics, and Functional Omics graduate courses at FCUP.


My current project focuses on developing new computational tools to study enzyme function and evolution, by combining the fields of computational chemistry and bioinformatics.