Congratulations to the first two PhD students who successfully defend their theses within the MIT Portugal Program: Alexandre Ferreira da Silva, from the University of Minho, and Pedro Andrade, from Instituto Superior Técnico.  On July 25, Alexandre Silva (EDAM LTI) defended his PhD thesis on the topic "The development of intelligent solutions based on fiber optic technology." The technology has the potential to be applied to buildings, airplanes, or in human kinematics and a demonstration in the biomedical field has been developed - a glove that allows monitoring of hand movements. It has several interesting applications and has been applied in the tracking of joint movements and cardiac and respiratory motions.
Alexandre has been working on the development of smart solutions based on optical fiber technology for different structures, such as buildings, aircrafts, or even for human body kinematics. There have been notable recent advances in optical fiber technology, and photonic solutions have become the most suitable technology for communication and sensing systems. Nevertheless, an open challenge is to find an effective solution for the application procedure, preferably one that scales at an industrial production level. Alexandre's research explores the insertion of optical fibers into polymeric PVC foils based on the spread-coating fabrication process and considers a range of possible applications that can emerge. The project was developed within the multidisciplinary environment provided by the research consortium composed of the University of Minho (School of Engineering), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the private companies Têxtil Manuel Gonçalves (TMG) and FiberSensing – all under the MIT Portugal Program umbrella.  On July 26, Pedro Andrade (Bioengineering PhD) defended his PhD thesis entitled "Novel Approaches for the Isolation and Ex-vivo Expansion of Hematopoietic Stem Cells from Human Umbilical Cord Blood for Cell Therapy." In his PhD thesis, Pedro explored the development of novel strategies for the isolation and ex-vivo expansion of human hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) from umbilical cord blood (UCB) for use in multiple settings, such as cell therapy (e.g. BM transplantation) or gene therapy.
Pedro is also one of the founders of Cell2B, a spin-off from IST that emerged from the MIT Portugal Program environment. The idea, of 4 PhD students in Bioengineering Systems, for creating the company stemmed from the "BioTeams – Innovation Teams". Cell2B was born in January 2011 and is dedicated to the development of an MSC-based therapy to prevent and treat organ rejection in patients undergoing organ or tissue transplants. | 
