He graduated in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 1991, and obtained a Ph.D. in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield, U.K., in 1996. He was a Research Associate with the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering of the University of Sheffield from 1994 until 1997, and a Lecturer at the Department of Electronic Engineering and Informatics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal, from 1997 until October 2010, when he joined the University of Coimbra.