He holds a BFA in Industrial Design from the Faculty of Architecture - Technical University of Lisbon and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design, New York. For this purpose he received 3 scholarships from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-American Foundation and a Dean's scholarship from Parsons School of Design. During the course of the MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency.
After 3 years living, studying, working and teaching in NYC, Manuel moved to London where he currently works as a Senior User Experience Designer at Nokia's NextGen Software & Services. Manuel is also a frequent speaker in conferences and festivals around the world, on the topic of Information Visualization, in particular the visualization of complex networks. He has spoken in events such as OFFF, SHiFT, Reboot, VizThink, IxDA Interaction and MeshForum