João Pires da Cruz holds a Ph.D. in Physics and a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Lisbon. He has spent his entire career working in both the private sector and academia. In 2006, he founded Closer, a consulting company focused on developing models to understand the dynamics of markets and economic activities. In 2018, he established the course on Physics Modeling in Economics and Finance at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. Currently, he serves as the vice president for Research and Innovation at Smart4Engineering (a Paris-based group), as a Partner at Closer (a Lisbon-based consulting company), and as an invited auxiliary professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Lisbon and an invited researcher at the School of Business and Economics at Nova University of Lisbon. Additionally, he is a senior researcher at the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Physics at the University of Lisbon, and a research fellow at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University.