I am Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisboa (ULisboa), Portugal, where I hold a Joint Appointment position with the Department of Physics and the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering.
I am a senior researcher at LIP where I am group leader of the theoretical nuclear/hadron physics group NPSTRONG. I also collaborate with members of the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering of IST on applications of nuclear radiation and ion beam techniques.
I work in theoretical Hadronic and Nuclear Physics, and I investigate how mass, charge and magnetism gets distributed among the quarks that compose the nucleons, the particles that in turn are assembled in the nucleus of the atoms. This distribution makes atomic nuclei suitable for important applications such as magnetic resonance imaging. It also tells us how nucleons and nuclei interact with photons, i.e. absorb and emit light, what are the rates of photo-nuclear reactions that occur in the cosmos, and how the formation of elements happens in stars.
Important open questions related to my research are: How does energy get stored in atoms? What does the emmissivity of matter under extreme conditions tell us about the "workings" and the evolution of the universe? How do elementary quarks acquire mass inside the protons that make up atomic nuclei? What is the origin of the proton magnetic properties?
I have coordinated 6 scientific pluriannual projects with competitive funding from the Portuguese Funding Agency (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, FCT) and was national leader for 5 European Networks and one Iberian Scientific Integrated Action. I have supervised 16 Master Thesis, 3 PhD Dissertations and 4 post- doctoral fellowships.
I am author of more than 100 peered review scientific publications. I wrote 5 books, including the international publication "Nucleus - A trip to the heart of matter", edited by Johns Hopkins, and translated into portuguese, czech, hungarian, french, swedish, and korean. I have presented numerous invited lectures and lectures at international institutions and conferences, and I have served on the Scientific Advisory Board of several international conferences.
I participated in the proposal of the Biomedical Engineering Masters Degree at IST, launched and coordinated that course in its initial years.
I was Director of the Portuguese Physical Society journal Gazeta de Física, and part of the Editorial Advisory Board of Europhysics News, a publication of the European Physical Society (EPS).
I was President of the Portuguese Physical Society and I serve now a second elected mandate as Member of the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society (EPS). I am part of the Physics for Development Working Group of the EPS. I serve as member of the European Research Committee on Few-Body Problems and of the International Light Cone Advisory Committee, ILCAC.
I served several Faculty and University bodies as the Senate of ULisboa and IST Scientific Council. I was President of the Department of Physics of IST ULisboa. I am President of the Pedagogical Council of IST.
I was recently appointed Associate Member of HFHF, the Helmholtz Research Academy Hesse for FAIR/GSI, a think-tank for the Physics explored at the GSI Accelerator Facility in Darmstadt, Germany. I was Visiting Professor at Ohio University, and distinguished with "The Robert and Rene Glidden Visiting Professorship", attributed to "Distinguished individuals who have attained wide recognition based upon artistic, engineering, historical, literary, or scientific achievement."
Scientific Activity
After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Hannover in Germany, I have worked on diverse problems of theoretical Hadronic and Nuclear Physics. The overarching theme of my scientific activity is the role of relativity in the interactions and structure of nuclear/hadron systems.
I contributed to pioneer studies on the origin of three-nucleon forces, forces that involve simultaneously three nucleons, cannot be reduced to pairwise forces. They determine emergent and collective behavior of nucleons inside nuclei. Three-nucleon forces are necessary to understand in detail how nuclei get bound and the properties of nuclear matter, having their origin in the fundamental Lagrangean of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
I also work now on spectroscopy and structure of hadrons, which affect the behavior of matter in extreme temperature and density conditions, in accelerators on the earth, or in cosmic events. The fundamental questions behind these activities are the origin of confinement of quarks in hadrons and nuclei, the origin of mass, the properties of matter in extreme conditions such as heavy-ion collisions and neutron stars, and the exotic multiquark structures of recently observed hadrons. To describe bound systems of quarks and gluons, we use nonperturbative functional methods such as Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations. These methods are complementary to lattice QCD simulations and provide ab-initio solutions for QCD correlation functions.
My secondary interests include Interdisciplinary training connecting Physics, Engineering, Biology and Medicine, applications of Radiation and Ion Beam techniques, and Computational Modelling.
Publications: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3529-2408