Manuel Verganista was born in Sobreira Formosa in 1996. He has bachelor’s and MSc in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa. His master's thesis was supervised by Professor José Virgilio Prata on the synthesis of fluorescent enantioselective chemosensors for enantiodifferentiation of biomolecules. After his studies, Manuel became a laboratory technician in the pHarmaLAB project, a collaborative project between Hovione Farmaciência S.A. and Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa with the aim of combating the high demand for chemical analysts felt by the company in previous years. He had a training period where he learned how to work in a GMP environment and learned four very important analysis techniques in the pharmaceutical industry (HPLC, GC, Karl-Fischer, and Particle Size Distribution) and respective equipment and software where he stayed for 2 years. After that, Manuel was accepted as a production technician at Bioceramed, where he was responsible for the kilo-scale production of biomaterials for orthopaedics, traumatology, spine surgery, and dental surgery. In mid-2022, Manuel moved to Aveiro to start his Ph.D. studies supervised by Professor Nuno R. Candeias. He is focusing again on synthetic organic chemistry, where he is currently studying the borrowing hydrogen reaction of biologically relevant molecules.