Joao Pinelo

Joao Pinelo designs, builds, and sustains public-interest technical systems at the intersection of Earth observation, sovereign infrastructure, and operational delivery.

His work focuses on turning research and analytical capability into operational systems that institutions can rely on over time. This includes designing the programme governance and coordination structures that navigate funding cycles, institutional boundaries, and multi-stakeholder complexity.

His trajectory has progressed from analytical tools measuring spatial and environmental systems, through domain-specific platforms serving operational users, to the foundational infrastructure that makes such systems possible. This reflects a consistent focus: building systems that are accountable to real-world outcomes, and the coordination structures that sustain them across institutions and funding cycles.

His background in architecture and evidence-based design informs how he approaches technical problems—design decisions are tied to measurable effects, and systems are evaluated by what they enable in practice. He holds a PhD from University College London and has worked across Lisbon, London, Berkeley, Bahrain, and the Azores.

He currently leads data science and cloud infrastructure at the Atlantic International Research Centre. This includes the design and operation of the AIR Data Centre (a sovereign EO data facility with direct satellite receiving station), Atlantic Cloud (transatlantic distributed infrastructure), and the Internal Waves Service (planetary-scale ocean monitoring). He also serves as the AIR Centre's liaison with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP-GRID) and founded JuliaEO, an international workshop series on Earth observation with Julia.

Outside the AIR Centre, he founded @depth, an initiative exploring energy-efficient, security-oriented private cloud infrastructure.