Rafael is currently a Junior Researcher contracted in the scope of the STOP.SUZUKII project.

Rafael concluded his PhD in 2022, and his PhD thesis title was "Genotypic and phenotypic profiles of Erwinia amylovora isolates associated with fire blight outbreaks in Portugal, and their susceptibility to antimicrobial peptides", supervised by Dr Conceição Santos and Dr Fernando Tavares. This thesis was funded by FCT (SFRH/BD/133519/2017).