Background
Ferreira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and attended the Technical University of Lisbon, where he studied engineering from 1986-1991.
Ferreira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and attended the Technical University of Lisbon, where he studied engineering from 1986-1991.
After going on to study for a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, supervised by Andy Albrecht and Neil Turok, Ferreira departed for postdoctoral positions at Berkeley and European Organization of Nuclear Research, before returning to the United Kingdom to join the faculty in the astrophysics department at the University of Oxford, where he became Professor of Astrophysics in 2008.
He is currently Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Oriel College. While there, he taught himself general relativity "to escape the drudgery" of the course. He has been director of the Programme on Computational Cosmology at the Oxford Martin School since 2010, and also runs an astrophysics "artist in residency" programme.
Ferreira regularly lectures at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and has frequently appeared on television and radio as a science commentator.
Ferreira"s main interests are in general relativity and theoretical cosmology. He has authored more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
With Michael Joyce, in 1997 he was one of the first to propose quintessence scalar field models as a possible explanation of dark energy. He is currently involved in several proposals to test general relativity using the Euclid spacecraft and Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.
Ferreira is a regular contributor to the scientific press, including Nature, Science, and New Scientist, and has authored two popular science books on cosmology and the history of general relativity.
One of them, The Perfect Theory, was shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science. He regularly appears on television and radio to discuss astrophysics and cosmology news stories, and has contributed to several science and mathematics documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corporation, Discovery Channel, and others Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (Channel 4) 2008 The One Show (British Broadcasting Corporation) 2009 Naked Science: Hawking’s Universe (National Geographic) 2009 Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? (British Broadcasting Corporation) 2010 Beautiful Equations (British Broadcasting Corporation) 2010 The Beauty of Diagrams (British Broadcasting Corporation) 2010.
Ferreira was also a member of the MAXIMA and BOOMERanG balloon-borne China Merchants Bank experiments, which were two of the first to measure the acoustic peaks of the China Merchants Bank.