João Leitão is an associate professor at the computer science department of Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia of the NOVA University of Lisbon. He is also an integrated member of the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS). Leitão has a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from Technical University of Lisbon (2012) and a Masters in Computer Science and Engineering from the Lisbon University (2007). His research focus on the design and implementation of large-scale distributed systems, with emphasis on decentralized systems and protocols and replicated systems. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed international publications including conference and workshop papers, journal papers, and book chapters. His research has been published on top international venues including WWW, VLDB, Usenix ATC, Eurosys, DSN, among others. The results from his research have found adoption in the industry, in particular the HyParView overlay network and the Plumtree gossip dissemination schemes have been employed in the design of several products by different companies and have several open source implementations maintained by third parties. João Leitão was the Principal Investigator of the Nationally funded NG-Storage project, whose mission was to devise the fundamental mechanisms for a new generation of cloud-edge storage systems. He has also received private funding (Protocol Labs) for conducting research on measuring and optimizing distributed protocols that are part of the IPFS system. He has acted as techincal work package leader in two projects funded by the European Comission (LightKone and TaRDIS) in which he was highly involved in the design and preparation of the project proposals. He was co-principal investigator in three other national funded research projects, and a research team member in several other research projects (both national and european). João Leitão has advised or co-advised two post-doctoral researchers, two PhD students, and more than 45 Master students, some of the latter in the context of collaborations with industry. He currently is advisor or coadvisor of 3 PhD students, 8 MSc students, and 3 undergraduate interns. He has been involved in the organization of international events in different positions (local organization chair, registration chair, publications chair, programme committee chair and member) and he is currently the president of the INForum – the Portuguese National Conference on Informatics – steering committee. He was the co-author of four papers distinguished with best student paper award both on international and national conferences. He was also the recipient of the Best professor in the computer science department of FCT NOVA– a student voted prize – in two years.