I received my PhD in Dynamical Systems from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste and the Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, under the supervision of Marcelo Viana an Jacob Palis in 1995. I was a postdoc at the Mathematics Institute at Warwick University from 1995 to 1999 and a lecturer, senior lecturer and reader from 2000 at Imperial College London where I co-founded the Dynamical Systems group DynamIC. In 2009 I had the privilege of moving to the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste where I coordinate the activities in Dynamical Systems and Ergodic Theory within the Mathematics Section.