Ricardo Faia, PhD (2022) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development (GECAD). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Salamanca (USAL), Spain, classified with high-grade marks, Excellent (30/30), cum laude honors. He works in the area of Power and Energy Systems, developing optimization models for local energy communities' activities, contributing to the energy transition. In particular, he focuses on local electricity market solutions considering peer-to-peer, community-based, and energy resources management models. Ricardo began his research journey in GECAD in 2015 as a research fellow; later, in 2017, he started his Ph.D. (funded by the “Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia”), his main focus was to promote the empowerment of electricity end-users in power and energy systems and electricity markets. He has been involved in 3 international and 8 national research projects, with highlighted participation in 3 H2020 research projects (DREAM-GO, DOMINOES, and TradeRES). In the H2020 DREAM-GO project, Ricardo participated in secondments in a German industry (Discovergy GmbH) and a USA university (Clemson University). In this project, he also had the opportunity to participate in various annual workshops, where he presented his vision regarding career paths for early-stage researchers and provided guidelines for MSc and PhD candidates. In the H2020 DOMINOES project, Ricardo coordinated and produced several deliverables, and developed local electricity market models for application in the project pilot. In the H2020 TradeRES Project (ongoing), he has developed bid formation models for participation in the electricity market, and market models for energy communities. Currently, he is responsible for coordinating GECAD team in Business Project no. 15 of the Next Generation Storage (NGS) project funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan of NextGenerationEU. In this project, he has also developed models for the operation of VPPs, with a focus on modeling storage systems, including second-life batteries. At an international level, Ricardo has also been working with industry partners, notably with the Honda Research Institute group from Germany, to investigate fairness in energy communities, including electric vehicles, in this collaboration his main role is optimization model developer. Ricardo gave talks in 5 international conferences. He has actively participated in promoting the ISAP Online Event 2022, where he has incentivized PhD and MSc students to participate in the Doctoral Consortium session, where he had the opportunity to share his experiences as a PhD student and present the potential opportunities available for recent PhD graduates, namely in the fields of GECAD research. He is coordinator of early-stage research career development activities. Ricardo Faia has also supervised 2 master's students in the energy domain. Ricardo has reviewed articles for more than 20 journals and conferences, including Applied Energy from Elsevier, and Transactions on Industrial Electronics from IEEE. He is the author and co-author of more than 50 scientific publications (19 journals (18 since 2018) and 40 conferences) and edited 1 special issue. Up until now, he has 981 citations (Google Scholar) with an h-index of 16 and an h10-index of 21 (February 2024). From his publications in journals, a notable one is the publication titled "Local electricity markets: A review of benefits, barriers, current trends, and future perspectives," published in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews by Elsevier, which has an IF of 15.9 (2023). He developed one variant of PSO (PSO-GBP) that ranked 3rd in a metaheuristic competition promoted by IEEE CEC 2018. He also received 2 Best 3rd paper awards at the 17th EEM 2020 and the 21st PAAMS 2023.