José D. Gouveia (JDG, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5099-7772) is a researcher at CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials at the University of Aveiro. As a student, he was awarded several prizes, including that of best student among all areas of science and engineering. He finished his PhD in Physics in 2017 at the University of Aveiro, where he focused on the transition between conducting and insulating systems, by studying the Hubbard model on two-dimensional decorated lattices. Before settling at CICECO, JDG was a post-doc researcher at the NATO project e-SiCure (https://www2.irb.hr/korisnici/capan/esicure2/index.htm), a consortium gathering partners in Slovenia, Croatia, Japan and Portugal, where he used ab initio DFT-based computational methods to study defects in SiC which may lead to limitations in detection efficiency. In CICECO, JDG started a new research line devoted to the computational analysis of the potential of MXenes for sensing and catalytic applications and of the enhancement of their catalytic potential by changes in their atomic layer stacking, and strengthened the scientific collaboration with several international groups, such as those of Francesc Illas at the University of Barcelona, Spain, of Kai Exner at the University of Essen, Germany, and Anna Zielinska-Jurek at the Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. He submitted successful applications to the Europa-HPC3 programme (awarded 60 kCPU.hours), to the Spanish Supercomputing Network (awarded 4 MCPU.hours) and to the FCT Calls for Advanced Computing Projects (2.6 MCPU.hours). He has published 30 papers in top journals (e.g. ACS Catal., ACS Appl. Bio Mater., Appl. Catal. B: Environ.; Appl. Surf. Sci.) with a total of over 450 citations so far. His work was also disseminated in tens of national and international scientific conferences. He is currently supervising an MSc student (Joana Figueiredo) and a Post-doc researcher (Kais Nassar), has supervised 3 MSc students and 3 BSc students, and helped supervise an MSc student (Raul Morales-Salvador) at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and a PhD student (Joana Lopes) at CICECO, Portugal. He contributes on a regular basis to motivating the career of young scientists as a scientific monitor at the Summer Academy of the Physics Department at the University of Aveiro.