I graduated with a Licence in psychology from the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) in 1999. In 2000 I joined the University of St Andrews (Scotland, UK) where I obtained a PhD in social psychology in 2004. After that, I worked as a teaching fellow in psychology at Lancaster University (UK) for 3 years, and then as a part-time junior lecturer in psychology at the University of Limerick (Ireland). I am now a researcher at Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisboa since June 2009.

So far my research has focused on attitudes towards supra-national groups - in particular attitudes to Britain and the EU in Scotland - and how these attitudes depends upon the perceived consequences of membership in such groups for the expression and enactment of national identity, i.e. how it is perceived to impact on the national way of life. I am also interested in the strategic use of identity in political discourse and other contexts, e.g. how national identities are constructed and used in order to make political claims, notably in relation to separation or integration in supra-national groups.

As a new member of ICS, my goal is to pursue this research but also to extend it to issues of attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. That is, I aim to investigate how these attitudes can depend on how immigration and immigrants are perceived to impact on national identity and on the national way of life, in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. Likewise, I am also interested in looking at the strategic aspects of judgements about immigrants, as a function of whether people aim to oppose or promote immigration.