Rafael Gomes Morais earned his master’s degree in chemical engineering from FEUP in 2017. He then joined the UniRCell team as a project researcher, where he worked until 2020, focusing on the preparation, characterization, and electrochemical applications of carbon-based materials for oxygen reduction and evolution reactions.

In 2021, he was awarded a PhD grant by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) to study noble-metal-free carbon-based materials for energy conversion and, the following year, he became part of the BiCat4Energy research team. As part of his doctoral studies, he spent three months in 2022 at Technische Universität Darmstadt as an Erasmus+ student under the supervision of Professor Bastian Etzold and successfully defended his European PhD in 2023.

Since September 2023, Rafael has been working as a Junior Researcher, focusing on the development and optimization of carbon materials as highly electroactive catalysts for renewable energy applications. In 2025, he joined the Greenship_E Project, where his research centers on catalyst preparation for ammonia decomposition, oxygen reduction and evolution reactions, and the hydrogen oxidation reaction.