Joao obtained his BSc in Physics at the University of Lisbon, followed by an MSc in High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics and Instrumentation at the Technical University of Lisbon, with a dissertation on The Spontaneous Breaking of the Chiral Symmetry in Hadronic Physics. He concluded his PhD in Physics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, with a thesis on Modelling Quark and Gluon Correlation Functions.
Having studied the structure of the nucleons in the first part of his academic career, Joao started studying the Climate of the Polar Regions when he moved to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge in 2002. His main topic of research was the thickness of the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean and how it has been decreasing in the past few decades due to global warming. The study was mostly performing analysing data collected by satellites and British and American submarines cruising in the Arctic beneath the sea ice.
Currently, Joao is mostly teaching and supervising several undergraduate courses in Physics and Mathematics at several Colleges of the University of Cambridge.