About

I feel like I was born in the Azores, even though I came into the world in a Lisbon hospital in 1980. I grew up surrounded by sea, crater lakes, warm natural pools, and green, tropical air — an islander, an “açoriano”, a kid from Ponta Delgada.

At 18 I left for Lisbon to study medicine. A few years later I chose to become a family doctor rather than a specialist in one organ or another — to specialize in people instead. I moved north to Portugal’s Alto Minho region, learned rural family medicine, and began teaching community health at the University of Minho, where I worked for a decade as a family doctor and lecturer before moving to Switzerland in 2014.

In Lausanne I trained in general internal medicine at Unisanté, the Center for Primary Care and Public Health at the University of Lausanne. I’ve stayed ever since — first as a resident, then chief resident, and today as deputy physician and head of the General Practice Polyclinic, a postgraduate training unit within Unisanté’s Ambulatory Care Department. I hold an MD from the University of Lausanne, and am Maître d’Enseignement et Recherche clinique and vice-director of the School for Medical Postgraduate Studies at its Faculty of Biology and Medicine. I am also the Deputy Medical Officer at Unisanté and a part-time master’s student in the Medical Education program at Harvard Medical School.

My academic interests include undergraduate and postgraduate primary care medical education, quality of care, patient safety, medical informatics, and clinical research in the primary care setting.

What holds it together, across countries and titles, is the same question: how do we train good doctors, and how do we practice good medicine?

That’s what I write about here — a full list of my scientific publications is on the Academia page, and you can reach me via the Contact page.

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Last updated: September 2026

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Use of AI

This site is built and maintained with the help of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. I set the ideas, direction, draft and provide the final approval for everything published here; Claude assists with researching, writing, and editing the essays, and with the site’s technical setup and management. No personal data submitted through the contact form is used to train any AI model.