Dr. Joao P. Da Silva Bento

Joao Bento is a Software and DevOps engineer for the New Robotic Telescope project, a 4m class fully automated optical telescope soon to be constructed in La Palma. This position is a natural combination of Joao's early background in astrophysics and his recent work in the software industry.

Joao obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Warwick, UK, specialising in Exoplanet detection and characterisation. This was followed by three postdoc positions in Australia. Work there included software development and characterisation of the RHEA spectrograph, working as the Australian HatSouth node manager and work on the GHOST spectrograph data reduction pipeline.

After this, Joao spent 4 years as a software and machine learning engineer working for Intelledox and later Smart Communications, world leaders in dynamic document generation, workflow automation and business process digitisation, before joining the New Robotic Telescope project.