Fernando Brandao was born in 1983 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He obtained his PhD in physics from the Imperial College London in 2005. For his PhD work, he was awarded the best thesis prizes in quantum electronics and optics from both the European Physics Society and the Institute of Physics. He was recently awarded the 2013 Quantum Information Young Investigator Award. He is currently a lecturer (assistant professor) in the computer science department of University College London. Previously, he held positions at ETH Zurich, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and Imperial College London. His main research interests are quantum information theory and quantum computation. He is interested, in particular, in connections of this area with other disciplines, such as optimization theory, many-body quantum physics, information theory and computational complexity.