Full Professor at Dep. Chemistry, University of Aveiro, Portugal, ex-Director (2002-2021) of CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials ( ca. 480 people), and present Coordinator of the Council of Associated Laboratories. Ph.D. in 1991 from the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, followed by a post-doc in the same department. Published >530 research papers and 5 patents, which received GOOGLE SCHOLAR >27,000 citations and h=80 (SCOPUS 23,000 citations, h-index 71). Gave >250 talks at conferences; and supervised 43 post-docs and 34 PhD students. Member of European Academy of Sciences (EURASC), Académie Royal de Belgique, Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry and of the ChemPubSoc Europe. Received the French-Portuguese prize from the Société Chimique de France, Madinabeitia-Lourenço award from the Real Sociedad Española de Química, the prizes Romão Dias, and Ferreira da Silva (Portuguese Chemical Society), and the prize for Scientific Excellence of the Portuguese Science Foundation. He was Chair of the 'Commission on Inorganic and Mineral Structures' and consultant of the 'Commission on NMR Crystallography and Related Methods' of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). He Chairs ERC Consolidator Grants Panel P11 (Materials Engineering). He is member of the editorial boards of Chemistry - a European Journal, and was on the editorial boards of EurJIC, Solid State NMR, Solid State Sciences, and editor of the RSC Nanoscience and Nanotechnology book series. -----PRESENT RESEARCH INTERESTS----- Microporous transition metal and lanthanide (Ln) silicates, photoluminescent Ln-bearing materials, and Metal Organic Frameworks for sensing applications, including nanothermometry. Nanosystems for multimodal imaging, therapy and drug delivery. Single-crystal and powder X-ray diffraction. Solid-state NMR: pioneered the development and application to materials of quadrupole nuclei techniques and 1H CRAMPS techniques. -----MAIN SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS ---- - A) Created a field of materials akin to zeolites: microporous silicates of transition metals and lanthanides (ca. 100 novel Ti, Zr, V, Nb, Cu, Sn, Ca, Y, Ce and other Ln silicates - AV and AM materials). Archetypal solid is titanium silicate ETS-10 (Nature, 367: 347, 1994). Explored applications in luminescence (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 137: 3051, 2015), catalysis, gas sorption and separation, ion exchange, magnetism, as MRI contrast agents and in pharma. B) Developed luminescent Ln-bearing Metal Organic Frameworks and coordination polymers (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 47: 1080, 2008), in particular for nanothermometry (Adv. Funct. Mater., 25: 2824, 2015). C) Developed oxide nanoparticles for imaging contrast agents (ACS Nano, 4: 5339, 2010), bimodal imaging (Biomater., 33: 925, 2012), and thermometry (Nature Nanotech, 11: 851, 2016; Adv. Mater., 35: 4868, 2013). D) Designed materials for small-drugs release (including NO, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 133: 6396, 2011). E) Devised materials for a more sustainable World (including anti-mosquito nets, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 9: 22112, 2017; and uranyl capture Angew. Chem., Intl. Ed., 58: 1, 2019). F) Designed (ca. 40) heterogeneous catalysts based on mesoporous silicas derivatized with metal complexes (J. Mater. Chem., 12: 1735, 2002). G) Elucidated the structure of minerals by NMR and XRD (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 113: 7100, 1991; J. Am. Chem. Soc., 114: 6867, 1992; Am. Mineral., 103: 812, 2018). H) Pioneered development of solid-state NMR techniques for studying quadrupolar nuclei (Solid State NMR, 21: 61, 2002; Magn. Reson. Chem., 41: 679, 2003) and 1H (J. Mag. Reson., 199: 111, 2009). ------SOCIETAL IMPACT------ Microporous zirconium silicate AV-13 (Inorg. Chim Acta, 356: 19, 2003), slightly modified, was exploited (Rocha consultant) by US company ZS Pharma (nos AstraZeneca) to treat hyperkalemia (excess K+ in serum). New drug Lokelma, approved by FDA and EMA, is on the market.