Ricardo Bessa was born in 1983 in Viseu, received his Licenciado (five-year) degree from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal (FEUP) in 2006 in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2008, he received the M.Sc. degree in Data Analysis and Decision Support Systems on the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto (FEP). He obtained his Ph.D. degree in the Doctoral Program in Sustainable Energy Systems (MIT Portugal) at FEUP in 2013. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher and Area Manager at INESC TEC in its Center for Power and Energy Systems.

His research interests include renewable energy forecasting, electric vehicles, data mining and decision-making under risk. He worked in several international projects such as the European Projects FP6 ANEMOS.plus, FP7 SuSTAINABLE, FP7 EvolvDSO, Horizon 2020 UPGRID, Horizon 2020 InteGrid and an international collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. At the national level he participated in the development of renewable energy forecasting systems and consultant services about energy storage.

He is co-authors of more than 32 journal papers and 61 conference papers.