Dr. Pereira obtained the Engineering and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal in 1983 and 1987, respectively, and received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering-Systems from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1993.

Between 1983 and 1988, he taught in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of IST as Full Lecturer in the areas of Electrotechnics and Electrical Measurements, Applied Electronics and Telecommunication Systems, and became Assistant Professor in 1994.

From 1988 to 1990, he worked at LinCom Corp., Los Angeles, in a NASA project on space-to-space communications, and on synchronization issues. From 1991 to 1993, he worked for Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) and PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology) on Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS)/Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). From 1993 to 1996, at GTE Laboratories Inc., Waltham, MA, was responsible for Communication Analysis and Simulation in the Federal Highway Administration National IVHS Architecture study; represented GTE at the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) IVHS Section, and in the High Speed Data Systems workgroup of the CDMA Development Group (CDG).

He has been with the European Commission since September 1996, initially as Scientific Officer, becoming Principal Scientific Officer in 2005. He has been dealing with ICT, covering a broad variety of areas, with a focus on networking, devices, applications and services, testing and validation, as well as deployment. He is, since 2016, in the area of Future Connectivity Systems, focusing on 5G and beyond, where he is responsible for the areas of Advanced Spectrum Management; optical-wireless convergence; Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM); and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR).

Professional Activities

He is a member of the Advisory Board of John Wiley's Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Journal, and of the Editorial Board of Kluwer Academic Publishers' Wireless Personal Communications Journal.

He is a Member of the IEEE, where he is Associate Editor for Mobile Radio, including Vehicular Communications, for the IEEE VTS Magazine, and a member of the IEEE Future Networks Summit Steering Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, responsible for CAM. He also served as Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.

He is a Chartered Electrical Engineer in Portugal.

Awards

He received the Industry Achievement Award of the Software-Defined Radio (SDR) Forum in 2003, in recognition of his “outstanding contributions, research and development in the field of SDR”, and was inducted as life-member of the Wireless Innovation Forum.

He was inducted in the IPv6 Hall of Fame, at the IPv6 Forum Summit in Nanjing, China, in October 2019.