Professor José Epifânio da Franca completed his Ph.D. at Imperial College London with the support of a research scholarship from British Telecom, after which he returned to Portugal to begin his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon.

In 1986, he founded the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Group at IST, focused on the advancement of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit and system design.

Over the first ten years of the group’s activity, Professor Franca supervised 32 graduate theses (12 Ph.D. and 20 M.Sc.) and was actively involved in more than 30 R&D projects, many of them within the framework of pan-European cooperative programs, most notably the ESPRIT programme, which brought together academic and industrial partners from across Europe.

He also established direct research collaborations with several leading European and U.S. companies, including Nokia Mobile Phones, Siemens, Austria Microsystems, British Telecom, Rockwell Semiconductors, and Atmel. The outcomes of his research efforts have been widely disseminated, with over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, 200 conference papers, several research books and monographs, and a co-authored chapter on Analog-Digital Conversion in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He is also the co-inventor of five international patents in the field of switched-capacitor networks.

Between 1987 and 1992, Professor Franca held various academic management roles, including member of the IST Executive Council, Vice-President of ITEC (Technology Institute for the European Community), and IST representative on the Academic Senate of the Technical University of Lisbon (UTL).

In 1997, he was elected Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), becoming the first academic in Portugal to receive this distinction. In 1999, he was awarded the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Golden Jubilee Medal, recognizing the 100 most influential researchers in the 50-year history of the society.

During this period, he also served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (1997–1999), on the Executive Council of the European Circuits and Systems Society (1998–2001), and was appointed Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society — a role in which he delivered numerous invited lectures and seminars at universities and companies around the world.

Since June 2000, he has held the position of Full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at IST.