Daniel F. M. Folha. I am an astronomer at Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) and a Lecturer at Instituto Universitário
de Ciências da Saúde (IUCS/CESPU). I've worked with spectroscopic techniques in the visible and in the near infrared, as well
as with photometric techniques in the optical. These were applied to the study of young stars and their immediate environment.
At IUCS/CESPU I am responsible, since 2005, for the Physics courses in the context of several degrees on Health Sciences.
I develop activities in science communication and outreach projects, in particular in the context of the Planetário do Porto
- Centro Ciência Viva, of which I was executive director between October 2014 and September 2019, and of IA's Science Communication
Group (SCG), of which I coordinated the Porto node, and co-coordinated de overall SCG activities, until the end of September
2020. I coordinated various science communication projects in the context of Ciência Viva, the National Agency for the Scientific
and Technological Culture, and I have been task coordinator of the outreach component of FCT financed research projects.
Since 2017 I co-authored various conference papers on science communication. I have made several oral presentations on different
astronomy and astrophysics centred themes for school teachers, including in the context of professional training courses for
teachers, for higher education students, for school pupils and for the general public. I have written science outreach texts
for the general public. I am a scientific reviewer for Casa das Ciências. In 2014 I was a member of the FCT evaluation committee
for PhD and PostDoc grants, within the Communication and Management of Science and Technology Panel. I co-supervised two PhD
thesis, supervised one MSc dissertation and co-supervised another one. I completed my formal science education with a PhD
at the Physics Department of Queen Mary University of London, UK, in 1998 (then Queen Mary and Westfield College - University
of London), which followed a Master of Science in Astrophysics also at QMUL, in 1993, and a Licenciatura in Physics/Applied
Mathematics at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal, in 1992.