News

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.

The Portuguese mobility company Critical Move, S.A., will partner with the MIT Portugal Program to launch an international design competition for autonomous vehicles in urban contexts. The agreement for the competition, to be called “Critical Challenge,” was signed at the 1st Annual MIT-Portugal Program Conference, “Engineering for Better Jobs,” at the Centro Cultural de Belêm in Lisbon on July 7, 2009.

Diamantino Costa, CriticalSoftware Vice President, speaking at the 1st Annual Conference

The competition will be open to teams to develop an autonomous electric vehicle able to transport up to nine passengers. Prototypes developed during the competition must complete two journeys in an urban setting of at least 2km each, one in daylight and another in darkness, using as little energy as possible and at their maximum speed.

The Challange is sponsored by Critical Move and the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia).

For details about the competition, visit www.criticalchallenge.com

Applications for the MIT Portugal Program’s academic year 2009/10 were open until February 28, 2009 for PhD courses and March 31, 2009 for MSc courses. During the admissions process, the Program received 310 applications from 60 different countries around the world. A total of 112 candidates were admitted, of which 47 were awarded an FCT MIT Portugal scholarship (PhD) and 11 were awarded a corporate scholarship (MSc).

The admissions selection process was conducted by juries composed of professors from each participating university in Portugal and from Program faculty at MIT. The juries were as follows:

Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, an MIT Portugal Program Bio-Engineering faculty member, is featured on the PBS television series NOVA scienceNOW, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Tuesday, July 21, 2009. The program will be broadcast numerous times in the United States in the coming days, but can also be viewed online or accessed via a podcast.

Prof. Bhatia

The program’s website includes an interview with Professor Bhatia and an interactive feature that enables visitors to put questions to her. NOVA’s profile of Professor Bhatia is the third segment of four in the one-hour program.

In January, 2009, Professor Bhatia was named one of 10 “Women to Watch” on January 23, 2009, by Mass High Tech, a Massachusetts-based newspaper that covers technology issues and trends. She holds an M.D. and a Ph.D., and is Professor of Health Science and Technology and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She has welcomed MIT Portugal graduate students work in her lab to work on projects that involve repairing and regenerating damaged tissue using micro- and nanotechnology tools.