About me...

I had the pleasure of doing my master’s in one of the most beautiful cities in the world — Porto! I hold a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Porto (Portugal), graduating in 2013 as 5th out of 349 students. During my studies my work was recognised several times, including the ABB Award and the Continental Prize for the best master thesis.

After my master’s I fell in love with space, so I took my first steps outside the university at the European Space Agency (ESA), where I spent two years as a trainee in the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) section, researching space robotics for debris removal and performing Hardware-in-the-Loop simulations.

From there I moved to the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) in Stuttgart, where I worked as a Research Engineer on control theory and motion planning for mobile manipulators, with a focus on manipulation tasks and human-robot interaction.

Wanting to push the research frontier further, I joined TU Delft as a PhD candidate in the Department of Cognitive Robotics. My doctoral work — supervised by Prof. Javier Alonso-Mora — focused on data-driven motion planning for autonomous navigation in human-populated environments, combining Model Predictive Control and Deep Reinforcement Learning. I graduated in October 2022.

After completing my PhD I joined the industry, first at Motional (February 2022 – January 2024), where I led the Motion Planning Research team and developed ML-based trajectory generation algorithms. I then moved to NVIDIA (February 2024 – present) as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, where I am part of the production team of Alpamayo, a Vision-Language-Action model for end-to-end motion planning now deployed on Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

Outside of work, I recharge by travelling, hiking, and exploring new places whenever I get the chance!