João Vasco Silva holds a PhD in Production Ecology & Resource Conservation from the same university, which focused on explaining yield gaps at farm(ing) systems level with case studies on mixed crop-livestock systems in Southern Ethiopia, rice farming systems in the Philippines and arable farming systems in the Netherlands. He has expertise in agronomy, yield gap analysis, farming systems research and integrated assessments of agricultural systems at field, farm and regional levels and skills in crop modelling and stochastic frontier analysis, among other methods. He is currently working on JPI-funded project (WaterFARMING) aiming to understand the drivers of water and nutrient use efficiencies across different production systems Europe and North Africa.