After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer and was promoted to Reader in 2019 and to Full Professor in 2022. Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2020 Young Chemical Biologist Award from the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) and recently the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientist in the UK – Finalist in Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer, and he has co-founded two companies that use technologies he developed in his lab.