João Lourenço currently serves as Co-Director of UNINOVA (Institute for Development of New Technologies) and as Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at NOVA School of Science and Technology (NOVA University Lisbon). He is also a founding members of the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS) and holds a position as Adjunct Professor in Faculty of Science at the Ontario Tech (formerly UOIT). Dr. Lourenço earned his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from NOVA University Lisbon, in 1991, 1995, and 2004 respectively and (co-)advised 40+ MSc students and 4 PhD students. His main research interests include in-memory data management for parallel and large-scale computing systems, high-performance databases, and the verification and validation (testing and debugging) of concurrent programs, and edge/fog computing. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed international publications including conference and workshop papers, journal papers, and book chapters, and received two Best Paper Awards at Euro-Par 2012 and HVC 2012. Participates and/or participated as Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) in 1 project, Invited Scientist Fellow in 1 project, Principal investigator in 2 projects and Researcher in 11 projects. Dr. Lourenço actively participates in academic and scientific committees, and is member of several advisory boards and steering committees for various international conferences and research networks. His scientific contributions have garnered recognition, He was a visiting researcher in prominent research institutions, including the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Israel, in 2011; the University of São Paulo (São Carlos), Brazil, in 2014; and the University of Brno, Czech Republic, in 2015, 2018, 2021 and 2023. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Lourenço is known for creating the widely utilised LaTeX thesis template “NOVAthesis” (http://joaomlourenco.github.io/novathesis/).