Ricardo joined the higher education at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro in Genetics and Biotechnology, where he started the research activity within the Centre for Genomics and Biotechnology, supervised by Prof. Gilberto Igrejas. During the Master thesis dissertation, he moved to INRA - Clermont-Ferrand (France), where he investigated the proteomic alterations on multiresistant strains of E. coli. Yet working at Michel Hébraud’s lab he was integrated in an Inter-University programme, focusing on the characterization of S. aureus proteome. Later on, Ricardo was integrated into the European Project DISCo (http://www.discoproject.eu) as ITN Marie Currie Fellow between INRA, Clermont-Ferrand France and GSK, Siena Italy, under the supervision of Mickaël Desvaux, Alfredo Pezzicoli and Mariagrazia Pizza. During the PhD, Ricardo contributed to the discovery of new antigens in pathogenic E. coli and the development of new techniques for bacterial proteomics. Research work developed up to date was focused on the use of omics tools, particularly in genomics and proteomics at the level of molecular genetics in microbial species. Nowadays, at i3S, the activity and interested areas of research are molecular facets of host-pathogen interactions to design new therapeutic strategies against gram positive pathogens.