As a Physics undergraduate at Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal), I started working on the foundations of Density Functional Theory (DFT), arguably the most broadly used electronic structure method. The goal was to derive exact conditions for the exchange and correlation functionals in the limit of a pure 2D confinement. Then, I continued this work in the group of Prof. Miguel Marques, as I was awarded on of the most prestigious Portuguese PhD fellowship. Whilst at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France) I had also the chance to work with Prof. Silvana Botti on the optical properties of nanowires. At the end of the thesis, Silvana and Miguel gave me the best training one could have in ab-initio methods (DFT, DFPT, GW, TDDFT, RPA, Bethe-Salpeter-equation) from the derivation of analytic expressions, their implementation in electronic structure codes, up to state-of-the-art end-user applications.

After the PhD, I sought to prove scientific independence by venturing into different and more interdisciplinary research. Prof. Rubén Perez offered me the possibility to start a new research line that initially consisted in answering a very simple question “How hard is an antibody?“. The trick was that to answer the question we had to push the limits of in-silico Scanning-Probe-Microscopy (SPM) by at least one order of magnitude in time and length scales. We did manage to answer the original question, and then some (graphene thermo-mechanical properties, charge transport in proteins, protein adsorption, friction in liquids, … ). Thus Rubén introduced me to the field of SPM,. In 2016 I moved to the group of Prof. Fernando Moreno Herrero, where I got acquainted with the fascinating world of biophysics, particularly with nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). Using a novel molecular dynamics simulation protocol we provided an atomic understanding of the mechanical properties of RNA/DNA.