After completing my PhD in 1999, I was awarded a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship from the FCT and joined the ULisboa (1999-2003). Then I moved as a postdoc to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Metals Research in Stuttgart, where after 3 years I became a senior scientist. I led research on wetting, nematic colloids, active colloids, and secured as a principal investigator (PI) grants from Germany (DFG) and the EU (FP7) (2007-2016). Next, after 1 year as a senior research associate at Northwestern University (USA), I was awarded in 2017 a 5-year fellowship as a PI by FCT, in a highly competitive international call with 10% success rate, to work at the ULisboa. My research activities focus on interfacial soft condensed matter and often include collaborations with experimentalists, which have resulted in 68 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including 1 Nat. Mater., 3 Nat. Commun., 7 PRL, 3 PNAS , 1 ACS Nano, 1 Nano Lett. The total number of citations is ca. 2480 (h=28 google scholar, and the number of citations since 2016 is ca. 1600). The most impactful were my papers on guiding self-propellers with patterned surfaces ([21], 242 citations); active colloids as micromotors ([37], 246 citations); nanoparticles in liquid crystals ([35], 80 citation); and on superhydrophobic surfaces ([30], 118 citations). I have supervised and co-supervised 15 students and postdocs. As a PI I was awarded 5 grants (DAAD, DFG, FCT, EU FP7) to hire PhD students, postdocs and to reinforce international collaborations across Europe and the USA, raising a total of EUR880k. I was an invited speaker at 12 international conferences and workshops and delivered 28 invited seminars at various institutions. I was in the organising committees of 7 international workshops, 3 of which were entirely funded by dedicated grants, in a total of EUR136k. During the last five years I held a FCT developing grant (IF/00322/2015) to study the behaviour of self-propelled particles in confinement and in complex media (2017-2021), and in 2020 I secured, in a highly competitive national call with a 6% success rate, a major FCT grant (PTDC/FIS-MAC/5689/2020) to work on dynamical phenomena in systems of topological solitons and nanoparticles. I was a visiting professor at Northwestern University in 2018 and 2019 to work on modeling magneto-elastic materials and to co-supervising a PhD student (ongoing). I have also participated in various outreach activities: I have given a talk on "Ultrasonic Propulsion of Microparticles" to a general audience at the annual national outreach event "Encontro Ciência 2019". At CFTC, I have contributed, through supervision of students, to its regular outreach events "Summer Internship" (2018, 2019) and was actively engaged in the CFTC-Industry Initiative. Since 2020, I am a co-organiser of a weekly seminar at Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional (CFTC). I am a reviewer of grant proposals for The German Research Foundation (DFG) and The Dutch Research Council (NWO) as well as a referee for several peer-reviewed journals including PRL, PNAS and ACS Nano.