José received his first degree in Biology from the University of Porto, in Portugal. He joined the GABBA PhD graduate program from University of Porto and then went on to do his PhD studies at Imperial College under the supervision of Professor Neil Brockdorff on heritable silencing mechanisms during mouse development. In his PhD José linked for the first time Polycomb group proteins to histone methylation and to random X-chromosome inactivation. After a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh where José identified the first defined gene with reprogramming activity, Nanog, he started his own laboratory in 2008 at the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge. His work was focused on the investigation of the biology of reprogramming adult cells back into Embryonic stem cells and was sponsored by prestigious Wellcome Trust fellowships. His work has led to numerous scientific contributions in the field of stem cell biology and was published in top tier scientific journals. Recently, José relocated his laboratory to Guangzhou, China, where he is now a Principal Investigator at the Guangzhou Laboratory.