I am a geoarchaeologist interested in unravelling past human behavior from its sedimentary signatures. My main interests concern the interaction between past humans and their environment. I focus on two main lines of research: (1) reconstructing the context and site formation processes underlying the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition and emergence of Anatomically Modern Humans; and (2) deciphering behavioral events from anthropogenic sediments, such as Paleolithic fire use, Neandertal funerary behavior, and the construction of shell mounds. I am particularly interested in assessing the ¿invisible record¿ embedded in archaeological sediments, and to achieve this I use micromorphological investigations of archaeological deposits. I have an interdisciplinary academic record with a PhD in 2012 from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the University of Pennsylvania and a graduation in Archaeology at the University of Lisbon in 2002. My postdoctoral research started at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where I currently hold an affiliation. Both as a field archaeologist and geologist, I have directed excavation projects and work in archaeological contexts in Europe (France, Portugal, Bulgaria), in the Levant (Israel), and Africa (Morocco, Ethiopia, Mozambique and South Africa). Currently, a group leader at the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB). I am a principal researcher at ICArEHB (UAlg) where I coordinate an ERC Starting grant looking into biomolecules from archaeological sediments. I As of December 2023, my H index was of 24 (GS).