Leaders for Technical Industries doctoral student Carla Pepe, the first speaker at the MIT Portugal Program’s 1st Annual Conference on July 7, 2009, “Engineering for Better Jobs,” told the audience of several hundred – including leaders from Portugal’s industrial and scientific communities – that her decision to join MIT Portugal had been fully validated by the quality of her coursework, her collaborations with faculty and students in Portugal and at MIT, and her research internship at Rolls-Royce plc in England. As one of the 150 PhD students currently enrolled in the MIT Portugal Program, Pepe gave her personal account of how she decided to join the Leaders for Technical Industries (LTI) program in September 2007 after graduating as a Mechanical Engineer from Instituto Superior Técnico–Technical University of Lisbon and working in various aerospace and automotive sector companies. Pepe said that her exposure to lean design concepts during her LTI coursework had developed, thanks to an International Industry Affiliate agreement with Rolls-Royce, into a thesis topic on “Lean Design – Standardization in Product Development.” The project research team counts Rolls-Royce researcher Rob Farndon as a collaborator.  PhD student Carla Pepe Pepe spent six months in 2009 at the Rolls-Royce research laboratory in Derby, England, developing her research before returning to Portugal for further training in leadership and completion of her thesis. The objective of her thesis project is “to investigate the possible use of standard activities to improve product development processes and their implications on the innovative environment of the design team.” Also, “to identify steps in the design process where Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) tools would introduce efficiency and quality benefits, and to quantify these benefits as much as possible, using Value Stream Mapping and Design Structure Matrix tools.” Pepe’s supervisors are Prof. Elsa Henriques (IST-UTL) and Dr. Dan Whitney (MIT). Her work is associated with the MIT Portugal research project on Lean Design in Product Development. The research team includes Pepe, Elsa Henriques (IST), Dan Whitney (MIT), Rob Farndon (Rolls-Royce), Arlindo Silva (IST) and Renato Natal (FEUP).
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