José Félix Costa has the BSc and MSc in Physics, the MSc in Applied Mathematics, the PhD in Mathematics, and the Aggregation (Habilitation) in Computer Science. He is Associate Professor for Theoretical Computer Science at the Section of Logic and Computation of the Department of Mathematics of IST. He was visiting Associate Professor at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and at the School of Physical Sciences, University of Swansea. He was also collaborator of the Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, Novo México). He was awarded with a Descartes award (in co-authorship) and a IBM honourable mention (1992), and received other distinctions.

José Félix Costa has been lecturing in a broad range of disciplines: History of Science, Mathematical Physics, Computability and Complexity, and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science. He advised five PhD students, fifteen MSc students, and fifteen Diploma Thesis. He has published about one hundred papers in international journals and conference proceedings.