Born in Brazil, he earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Syracuse University (New York, 1982).
In January 1983 he joined the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, UK, as a Research Associate, where he got married with a Spanish geneticist.
The same authors also formulated the Schechter-Valle theorem [3] demonstrating that an observation of neutrinoless double beta decay will necessarily imply neutrinos to be Majorana fermions and vice versa.
He also contributed to the correct interpretation of the oscillations of solar and atmospheric neutrinos[4] which led to the physics Nobel Prize 2015 awarded to Arthur B. McDonald and Takaaki Kajita.
The discovery of neutrino masses and oscillations can be considered as the only firm indication of the incompleteness of the Standard Model of particle physics with important consequences also for astrophysics and cosmology.