Fernando Brito e Abreu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from IST/UL and is an associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies at Iscte-IUL, where he has held various positions such as director of the Master's Degree in Computer Science and Management (MIG), member of Iscte-IUL's Scientific Council representing the ISTAR-IUL Research Unit and responsible for DCTI's internationalization. He was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at FCT/UNL. He also taught at ISEGI/UNL (now NOVA IMS), IST/UTL, ISEG/UTL, and the Air Force Academy. He was also a guest lecturer at the Département Informatique of the École des Mines de Nantes for a decade, as part of the EMOOSE European master's degree. At these universities, he taught and was responsible for around a dozen subjects in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd cycles. He has supervised more than 30 dissertations, including 10 PhDs, 6 of which have already been completed.

He was a researcher in the Software Engineering Group at INESC Lisboa, in the CITI research center (Center for Informatics and Information Technologies) at FCT/UNL and later was one of the founders of the ISTAR-IUL research unit at Iscte-IUL, where he created and was the 1st coordinator of the Software Systems Engineering group, where he remains today. He promoted the signing of various applied research/technology transfer and/or collaboration protocols between: (i) INESC and the Portuguese Navy, (ii) CS/03 and itSMF Portugal, (iii) NAV EPE and FCT/UNL, (iv) SINFIC and FCT/UNL, (v) Turismo de Portugal and Iscte-IUL and (vi) GEOTA and Iscte-IUL. In addition to the projects funded and developed under these protocols, he has coordinated research teams in various national and international scientific projects.

He has produced more than two hundred scientific and technical texts, including articles in journals such as Empirical Software Engineering, Software Quality Journal, Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, Science of Computer Programming, Journal of Systems and Software, IEEE Latin America, Object Expert, Computer Standards & Interfaces, ERCIM News, Personal Computer World, L'Objet, Qualirama, Sistemas de Informação e Interface. His work has been cited nearly 4K times, with an h-index close to 30, according to Google Scholar. He pioneered in Portugal in Empirical Software Engineering with his research group QUASAR (QUantitative Approaches in Software engineering And Reengineering). Among his proposals are the MOOD (Metrics for Object Oriented Design) suite, currently used in the software industry and the Metamodel Driven Measurement (M2DM) approach. The latter allows the abstract formalization of metrics over a domain metamodel using OCL, a constraint specification language that is part of UML. M2DM has been applied in various domains (e.g. object-oriented design, component-based development, business process modeling, IT infrastructure modeling).

He is currently an editor of the Sofware Quality Journal (Springer) and was previously associate editor of Software Quality Professional (American Society for Quality), Portuguese delegate to IFIP TC2 (Software: Theory and Practice), and member of the technical team of the MPS.BR process model, widely used in Brazil. He has been a regular reviewer for various international journals, conferences, and workshops, as well as an evaluator of research projects. He has participated in the organization of national and international scientific events in a wide variety of roles. He was also president of CS/03 (Sectorial Commission for Quality in Information and Communications Technologies), of the Portuguese Quality Institute, from 2000 to 2007, where he was one of the creators of the international QUATIC conference (https://www.quatic.org). In 2021 he was elected Chairman of the QUATIC Series Scientific Steering Committee.