I did my first degree in Chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal. This was followed by my Ph.D. in Muon research at both the University of Glasgow, UK, with Dr. Brian Webster, and the then Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research (SIN) in Villigen, Switzerland, with Professor Emil Roduner. I then decided to completely change my field of research and did a post-doc in Molecular Modelling with Professor Graham Richards at the University of Oxford, UK. In 1991, I became a Professor in Theoretical Chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, where I still am today. I now head the Theoretical and Computational Biochemistry Research Group but have kept my former link to Oxford, becoming an Associate Director, back in 2000, of the Centre for Computational Drug Discovery at Oxford, funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research.