Associate Director and Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University - Africa, IEEE Fellow, YPO member, tech entrepreneur and angel investor

João Barros is a Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) - Africa. He also serves on the leadership team as the CMU-Africa Associate Director. Prior to that, he was the Chief Platform Officer at Nexar Inc, former Founder and CEO of Veniam Inc. (acquired by Nexar), and Professor Catedrático of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal. He was Founding Director of Instituto de Telecomunicações in Porto, which grew from 8 to 100 researchers during his six-year tenure. Joao Barros was also a Fulbright scholar twice and has held visiting appointments at MIT, Stanford, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. He regularly advises the Porto Business School and served on the board of Streambolico, a WiFi multicast company he co-founded (later transformed to Codavel). Dr. Barros has received several awards, including the 2010 IEEE ComSoc Young Researcher Award (EMEA), the 2011 IEEE ComSoC and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2012 BES National Innovation Award, the 2013 Building Global Innovators Grand Prize (ISCTE-IUL and MIT) and a best teaching award by the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts. His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, FastCompany, and The Atlantic, among several other relevant media outlets. João is fluent in Portuguese, German, English, French and Spanish. He received his undergraduate education in ECE from the Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany, a performing arts degree in flute from the Music Conservatory of Porto, and the Ph.D. degree in EE and IT from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany. Specialties: product and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, communication networks, information security, vehicular networks, information theory