Jonas completed his postgraduate degrees (M.Sc./Ph.D.) in Microbiology at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) studying the activation and functional relevance of intracellular signalling pathways during different stages of viral lifecycles, under the supervision of Prof Claudio Bonjardim. After a short period as postdoctoral researcher in the same group, Jonas was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in 2015 to continue his postdoctoral research in the University of Cambridge. He worked first with Prof Geoff Smith, investigating antagonism of antiviral defences by vaccinia virus, the smallpox vaccine and a model DNA virus. In 2021, Jonas joined Prof Mike Weekes’s group to explore vaccinia as a tool to study cytosolic DNA sensing using mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Since 2023, he leads a research programme in The Pirbright Institute dedicated to investigate virus tropism and host species barriers to capripoxvirus infection. The Capripoxvirus Biology group seeks to answer fundamental questions about how viruses infect cells from different host species, how cells defend themselves from viruses and how viruses overcome such antiviral defences to replicate and spread the infection, using capripoxviruses and other poxviruses as models.