Member of Parliament in the XI legislature, elected 27 September 2009, heading the PPD/PSD list of candidates in the District of Bragança, until June 19th,2011.
Acting President of the Santander Group, an Association of European Universities, 2001-02.
Vice-president of the Alban steering committee (the European Union program of scholarships for Latin America and Caribe), 2002.
He acted as international expert on Higher Education for (i) CONAES, Higher Education Evaluation Council of Brazil, (ii) OECD – IMHE programme, (iii) IAU/UNESCO, International Association of Universities – chairing the Working Group on Access, and (iv) acts as European Higher Education Policies expert in the Latin-American project 6x4 UEALC that aims at establishing a common Higher Education space.
Chair of the Interministerial Commission for mobility and Portuguese delegate to the European Union, 2002-04.
Coordinator of the Working Group (of the Ministry of Higher Education) to draft the recommendation on the application of the Bologna reform to the Exact Sciences, 2004.
Bologna Promoter, 2004-05.
Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Sciences, 1997-98.
Dean of the Chemistry Department of the Faulty of Sciences, 1994-96.
Member of the Executive Committee of the European Federation of Societies of Chemistry, 1998-2004.
He has frequently acted as an evaluator for the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and as a referee for many international Chemistry journals.
He was in the governing body of APPACDM-Porto (Associação de Pais e Amigos do Cidadão Deficiente Mental), for 9 years.
By the will of D. António Ferreira Gomes, the late Bishop of Porto, he is a life member of the board of the Spes Foundation.President since March 2013.
For more than 20 years, he lectured at the University of Porto on subjects of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry and Statistical Thermodynamics, as well as Physical Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry. He has published more than 100 scientific papers on international journals of Chemistry. He has been especially interested in the properties of ionic solutions and their interfaces, this being motivated by problems of heterogeneous catalysis and electrochemistry. On the magnetic properties of molecules, especially of catacondensed aromatic hydrocarbons, he published more than 20 years ago a series of papers on the topological analysis of the induced electronic currents that still stand as foundational contributions to this topic. He gave plenary conferences on scientific meetings across Europe, in the US and in India.
He has published more than 100 texts on education policies concerning Portugal, Europe and Latin America.
He is fluent in Portuguese, French and English and is able to communicate in Spanish and in German.