Afonso holds a Bachelors and Masters degree from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He was awarded a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University, under the supervision of Amit Singer. After spending a year at MIT, he joined the faculty at the Mathematics Department of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Data Science, both at the New York University. Since September 2019 he is a Professor of Mathematics at the ETH Zurich. Afonso's research interests are in the broadly defined are of Mathematics of Data Science. Recent recognitions include a Sloan Fellowship in 2008, the 2019 ISAAC prize for Young Scientists, the 2020 Stephen Smale Prize from the FoCM society, and the 2020 Information Theory Society Paper Award.