When he was 11 years old, he had a strong motivation and decided to become an electrical engineer when his cousin, Hélio Adauto de Paula, showed him vacuum tube radios, transistorized audio amplifiers, and took Simões to visit his work as an electrical machine designer in Equacional, a motor manufacturing company in the city of São Paulo.

Simões was enrolled in an evening Catholic high school from 1978 to 1980, "Liceu Coração de Jesus", where he learned electronics as part of a technician degree.

In 1982 he was admitted to the Electrical Engineering Department of EPUSP and started an internship at FDTE - Fundação para o Desenvolvimento Tecnológico da Engenharia.

His Senior Design in 1985 was a modem with analog and digital circuits implemented for interfacing an 8085 microprocessor, operating on a regular telephone connection.

During his four years internship for FDTE, he was learning with senior engineers how to design DC-DC converters and off-line switching mode power supplies, using Phillips manuals for TV flyback circuits and National Instruments handbooks.

Those power converters were built and implemented in railroad automation (FEPASA), as well as in the São Paulo Metro subway system.

Simões also learned a lot from Prof. Edson Benedicto Ramos Féris and Prof. Guido Stolfi techniques for analog high-frequency circuit designer.

From 1986 to 1989, Simões worked for FDTE, at the same time leading technical research with three other partners who together started a company, Antares Eletrônica.

Simões joined EPUSP in 1989 as an instructor in the newly formed Mechatronics group inside the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and finished his master's degree in 1990.

In August 1991, Simões was admitted as a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, supported by a Brazilian scholarship from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa), with a leave of absence from EPUSP.

Simões was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor, after he obtained his Livre-Docência Diploma in 1998 (similar to a Doctor of Science degree).

He worked as a visiting professor with UTBM – University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard, and ENS - l'École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, in France, supervised an international power quality laboratory in Brazil at São Paulo State University – UNESP, served as technical advisor for Universidad APEC in the República Dominicana.