João Gomes Cravinho was born in Lisbon on 16 June 1964. He holds a doctorate in Politics by the University of Oxford (1996) and a Master’s degree in Politics of the World Economy by the London School of Economics (1987). On April 2017 he attended the Harvard Business School’s Leadership for Senior Executives Programme.

He was a lecturer on International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, and was also a guest teacher at ISCTE (Lisbon) and at the Faculty of Law of the New (“Nova”) University of Lisbon. He also worked as a consultant for the Institute for National Defence (Portugal), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), the European Commission and the World Bank.

João Gomes Cravinho was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of the XVII and XVIII Constitutional Governments, between March 2005 and June 2011, and was the European Union’s ambassador to India from December 2011 to July 2015, and to Brazil from August 2015 to October 2018.

He authored a book, Visões do Mundo, in 2002, as well as numerous articles in specialized academic publications and newspapers.