João Miguel Mendonça Correia graduated in 2015, published 18 research articles, his work was cited 662 times and he has an h-index of 10. João Miguel Mendonça Correia was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1981. He graduated in Telecommunications and Computer Science Engineering from University-ISCTE, Lisbon. In 2005, he started an engineering career in Siemens where he worked on two international projects concerning the research and development of 3rd Generation telecommunication platforms. In 2008, João took a sabbatical time to pursue a master’s in biomedical engineering at the University of Patras, Greece. The master’s education attracted him to brain research, which was further amplified during an internship at the Technical University of Berlin, working in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces using EEG, and later during his Master thesis project at Stockholm University and Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, researching EEG correlates of working memory performance in young and elderly populations. After the master studies, João could only envision himself working in the field of brain sciences. He was involved in the creation of the ICD-11 (mental health chapter) during his work at the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, in 2010, and later that year decided to pursue a PhD under on the ‘neural code of speech and language’, under the supervision of Prof. Bernadette M. Jansma and Dr. Milene Bonte (defended in 2015) at the department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. During this time, he investigated brain mechanisms critical for the perception of spoken language, specifically on brain response patterns to individual spoken items employing computational models that exploit multivariate statistics. Between 2015 and 2017, João was a post-doctoral researcher involved in multiple brain imaging projects on speech perception and speech production within the same group. During this time he coordinated the course of 'Auditory and higher order language processes' in the research master programs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University. He visited the Haskins Institute at Yale University, USA, after have received the Auditory Cognitive Network grant from the Erasmus Mundus project. Together with Prof. Vincent Gracco at Haskins, João deepened his knowledge and passion for speech production and sensorimotor mechanisms. In 2017, Joao received a fellow of the spanish goverment grant 'Juan de la Cierva' to conduct speech production research at the Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Spain. In 2019, João received the Portuguese grant from the FCT (CEEC) to initiate a new line of research at the University of Algarve, where brain imaging and machine learning are combined to unravel some of the mysteries of stuttering. In 2019, João was 5 months in paternity-leave for the birth of his first child. In 2021, João was 4 and a half months in paternity-leave for the birth of his second child.