He graduated in Civil Engineering from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio (1977), obtained a master’s degree in Civil Engineering from PUC-Rio (1980), a PhD in Structural Engineering from Cornell University (1989), and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Technical University of Lisbon (2012). Since 1990, he has been an Associate Professor at PUC-Rio.

His expertise lies in the field of Civil Engineering, with a focus on Structures. As a research project coordinator at Tecgraf/PUC-Rio (Tecgraf Institute for Technical-Scientific Software Development), his main scientific contributions cover topics such as Computer Graphics, Geometric Modeling, Numerical Methods applied to Engineering and Geological simulations, Computational Fracture Mechanics, and Educational Software for Engineering Education.

He is the creator of the Ftool program, widely used in Civil Engineering and Architecture courses in Brazil and other countries.

He served as the Coordinator of the Civil Engineering undergraduate program (1998-2001) and was one of the creators of the Architecture and Urbanism program at PUC-Rio (started in 2002). From 2005 to 2007, he worked at PUC-Rio as the Central Coordinator of Planning and Evaluation and President of the Internal Assessment Committee. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Central Coordinator of Infrastructure at PUC-Rio. Currently (2012), he is the Vice-Dean of the Technical-Scientific Center (CTC) at PUC-Rio, acting as the Sectoral Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies.