Joao Pinelo is the Head of Data Science, Cloud Infrastructure and Development at the Atlantic International Research Centre. He has been at the Earth Observation Lab (AIR Centre) - a laboratory of the European Space Agency (ESA) - since 2020, where he was the project manager for building and setting up a data centre. He defined and manages systems’ architectures for networking, storage and computation of the datacentre, which he set up as a hybrid cloud. He set up and is responsible for the ground segment of the Direct Receiving Station, which streams and processes Earth Observation satellite data in real-time. Joao develops systems and software, including data science pipelines, databases and web applications. He managed several projects, and he is the chief architect of an alert system. He is also the chief architect of the IoT network of the Azores, and the chief architect of the Custodian system (real-time monitoring of small fishing vessels and gear). He is coordinating the set-up of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) node GRID Azores. Between 2010-13, he was Chairman and Chief Product Officer of the startup Strategic Spatial Solutions Inc. which he co-founded in Berkeley, California, with the responsibilities of leading the board to deliver business strategies, while developing high governance standards. He also worked on the definition of user requirements and use cases, liaise with potential clients and final users, and software testing. He an alumnus of University College London, where he earned a PhD in architecture. He has have (co-)authored scientific papers, including in Nature Communications. He has over 18 years of experience in higher education in Europe, the UK, and the Middle East, where I was an Assistant Professor. He is happiest while leading teams, strategising, playing with new ideas and stress-test them, brainstorming, creating systems architectures, exploring a new dataset, and writing code.