Olá! I'm João, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Técnico-ULisboa and a researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações. Previously, I was an assistant professor in the CS Department of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Before that, I was a post doctoral fellow in the CS Department of Carnegie Mellon University, hosted jointly by Vipul Goyal and Venkatesan Guruswami.

I received my PhD from the Department of Computing of Imperial College London, where I was advised by Mahdi Cheraghchi. Before that, I received an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and a BSc in Applied Mathematics and Computation from Técnico-ULisboa.

Research interests: A (time-varying) convex combination of discrete math and probability. More precisely, I am interested in any combination of coding theory, information theory, and theoretical computer science (in particular, cryptography and pseudorandomness).

For more on our research group at IT/Técnico, see this page.

For pointers to my work, see this page.

Funding: My research has been generously supported by FCT and an ERC Starting Grant.

Prospective students:

I am always looking for motivated PhD students with a strong math background. Besides project-specific funding I may have, we can also apply for an FCT PhD scholarship or a CMU-Portugal PhD scholarship.

If you are an MSc student at IST, you are welcome to reach out to me about MSc thesis projects. If you are a BSc student (at IST or elsewhere) you are also welcome to contact me about BSc final projects and independent research projects.

Conference program committees: ITW 2027, Eurocrypt 2027, Asiacrypt 2026, TCC 2025, CRYPTO 2025, RANDOM 2024, ITC 2024, TCC 2023, ITC 2023.