João Paulo Carvalho Dias was born in Lisbon on November 18, 1944.

He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Lisbon in 1966. After graduating, he worked under the supervision of José Sebastião e Silva, one of the most proeminent Portuguese mathematicians of the XX century, in Functional Analysis and  Theory of Distributions.
J. P. Dias obtained a Thèse d’État (Phd) from the Université de Paris VI in 1971, with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the supervision of Jacques-Louis Lions. Title of the thesis: 'Quelques problèmes variationnels nonlinéaires de type elliptique ou parabolique'.
Returning to Portugal, Prof. Dias had a pivotal role in introducing the modern approach to the study of Partial Diferrential Equations and their aplications, creating a very productive school in the Department of Mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences,  University of Lisbon.

His influence manifested itself by the formal and informal supervision of several students and young researchers in the country and by  initiating a strategy of sending abroad  Portuguese Phd students.

Prof. Dias is the author of a large number of scientific publications in Partial Differential Equations and one of the main responsibles for the international projection of the Portuguese research journal Portugaliae Mathematica, for wich he was chief editor from 1996 to 2007.

He served as President of the Departement of Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences of ULisboa from 1988 to 1990.

He is the recipient of many prizes, among others:

Prize Artur Malheiros (Mathematical Sciences) of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (with Prof. Hugo Beirão da Veiga), June 1973

Prize Gulbenkian of Science and Technology (with Prof. Mário Figueira and ex-aequo with Prof. Fernando Conceição Silva), Mars 1989

Grande Oficial da Ordem de Santiago da Espada, September 2000. 

Retired on November 18, 2014, João Paulo Carvalho Dias is a Professor Eméritus of ULisboa since June 2016.