luispedro

Luís was born, just over 26 years ago, in the coast city of Southampton. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Lisbon, where Luís grew up. A series of fortunate coincidences brought him to the German School of Lisbon where he obtained his Abitur (final German high school diploma).

He went on to study computer science at the Technical University of Lisbon. Before finishing his degree, he spent one year in Vienna as an exchange student. Although Luís had initially planned to graduate and move on to an industry job, intellectual curiosity led him to enrol in graduate courses as electives. His interest spiked, upon graduation, he enrolled in the master's program (the Technical University of Lisbon offered the possibility of carrying the credits over, in effect merging the end of a bachelor with the start of the Masters program).

He wrote his dissertation about theoretical work on machine learning problems (how to handle noisy data for certain parameter estimation problems). At the same time, he came into contact with people working on bioinformatics and starting attending their research presentation.

This field attracted him. Here were large, complex, unsolved problems. Problems which were both theoretically challenging and of huge practical importance as they cross over to medicine. To prepare himself for this, he entered the CMU-U. Pittsburgh Ph.D. program in Computational Biology. He hopes to build up his skills and knowledge so as to be able to become a future researcher with an impact.

Reminded always of Mark Twain's advice to not let schooling interfere with one's education, Luís has taken care to participate in a mix of side projects and hobbies. He has participated in the university's theatre group with which he traveled to international festivals to play. He has received one a prize in a short story competition and also written open source software for the KDE project. He has taught computer usage in underprivileged neighbourhoods and designed webpages for nonprofits.