I was originally trained as a computer scientist at the University of Porto, Portugal where I earned a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science. For my Ph.D. I followed my fascination for life sciences and pursued a Computational Biology Program at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, Portugal and a PhD in Biology at the University of Lisbon, Portugal that included a 4-year and a 2-year research training in Ecology and Evolution at Princeton University, NJ, USA and at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Blanes, Girona, Spain where I was supervised by Prof. Simon A. Levin and Dr. Frederic Bartumeus, respectively, on the statistical properties of animal movement. I did my postdoctoral training at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, UK in Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science with Prof. Rowland Kao with focus on risk-based surveillance strategies and molecular epidemiology for animal tuberculosis control. Before moving to the University of Arizona, I was an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases and Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia, GA, USA where we focused on the application and development of bioinformatics tools for the study of bacterial evolution and adaptation across multiple organizational scales.