José RICARDO Ramos FRANCO Tavares is an Associate Professor, with Habilitation in Physical Biochemistry, at Department of Chemistry, NOVA School of Sciences and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is a researcher at Applied Molecular Biosciences Unit (UCIBIO-REQUIMTE) in the Research Group Nano-Immuno Tech. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry, at the NOVA University of Lisbon, in 1995, in Bioinorganic Chemistry. He then had post-doctoral stays on Protein Biochemistry and Spectroscopy at TiHo, Hannover, Germany, with Dr. Juan Calvete, to which he was recipient of a Alexander von Humbolt scholarship; and at the College of Medicine, University of South Florida, USA, with Prof. Gloria Ferreira. From several post-doctoral stays with Prof. John Shelnutt at the Sandia National Laboratories and University of New Mexico, USA, he started a new research area in Bioanotechnology and Raman spectroscopy. In 2003-2004 he was Head of the Raman Spectroscopy Laboratory at ITQB-NOVA, Portugal. His current scientific interests are i) development of molecular diagnostic rapid tests (point-of-care), based on gold nanoparticles to detect specific nucleic acid sequences, antigens or antibodies for diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, fungal infections, or metabolic diseases; ii) development of bio-functionalized gold and silver nanostructured surfaces and nanoparticles for superior detection sensitivity by Surfaced Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS); iii) physical-chemistry of bio/non-bio interactions, e.g., antigens/antibodies/enzymes with gold nanoparticles. He is co-author of 76 articles with an h-index of 33, and 3,496 citations (3,297 excluding self-citations) as of February 2025. The average impact factor (IF) of journals in which he has published is 4.45. He was the supervisor of 6 post-doctoral researchers, 4 Ph.D. students and co-supervised another 4. He supervised/co-supervised 26 M.Sc. students. He participated in five FCT/MCTES financed research projects, three as PI.