During the fall semester, 2010, we inaugurated the MIT Portugal Program Visiting Scholar Lecture Series. Featuring a number of Portuguese faculty who have been spending time as visitors at MIT, the lecture series has focused on a variety of MPP research areas, from malaria to transportation to neurodegenerative disease. The lecture series has offered us a chance to introduce MPP researchers to a broader section of the MIT community, and each lecture has attracted, in addition to our MPP community, a good-size audience of people around MIT interested in the subject matter. Receptions following the talks have allowed further time for interactions and discussions to take place.
Beginning with the second speaker (Jose Viegas), these lecture are being videotaped and are available in the MPP video library. Video
Tissue Engineering Projects Profiled in Executive Digest
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
MIT Portugal’s vanguard research in developing hybrid materials to serve as “scaffolding” in place of naturally-occurring tissue in order to facilitate growth and healing after trauma or illness was recently profiled in Executive Digest magazine.
The MIT Portugal research application area of Stem Cell Engineering for Regenerative Medicine, in which tissue engineering projects are conducted, was named in December 2009 by MIT President Susan Hockfield as an area in which Portugal could be globally competitive.
The authors of the Executive Digest piece, Prof. Manuela Gomes of the 3B’s Research Group of the University of Minho and Prof. Ali Khademhosseini of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, are both participants in the teaching and research initiatives of the MIT Portugal Program Bioengineering program area. In addition, they collaborate in the project “Micro/nano design of functional stem cell-instructive materials for bone tissue regeneration,” on which Gomes is the principal investigator, which received a three-year research and development contract from the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through the 2009 FCT-MIT Portugal Open Call for research and development projects.
The article describes the research involving researchers from Portuguese universities and from MIT, as well as from Stemmatters, an MIT Portugal industrial affiliate that will also participate in the recently-awarded FCT-MIT Portugal research project.
Major Portuguese media outlets devoted significant coverage to the Second Annual Conference and associated initiatives. A selection of major articles on the Conference appears below:
MPP Fourth Academic Year Welcomes Students with Teamwork Challenges, Reflections
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Student teams working to lift sticks in unison--a surprisingly difficult task
Marking the start of the MIT Portugal Program’s fourth academic year, nearly 200 new and returning Doctoral and Executive Master’s students from all seven educational programs gathered for a Student Welcome Event at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto on September 27, 2010.
Held the day before the Second Annual Symposium, the purpose of the Student Welcome was to create awareness of the extent of the Program’s research initiatives, to enable the students to develop their own network of personal and professional contacts, and to challenge them with group activities aimed at building their teamwork capacity and leadership skills.
Program Directors Prof. Dan Roos and Prof. Paulo Ferrão formally welcomed the students to the program and to Porto. Then MIT Prof. Dava Newman, the coordinator of the Bioengineering Systems area, gave a keynote address in which she advised the students to make the most of their MIT Portugal experience by following her “LADI” motto: to Learn, Act, Discover and Innovate. Prof. Newman challenged the students to fulfill the promise of their already extraordinary achievements, telling them, “We are counting on you to invent a future that offers new knowledge, new techniques, and innovation to solve the complex challenges that we face in energy, medicine, design and transportation.”
Second Annual Conference Engages 300 Delegates in Review of Collaborative Research
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
João Nuno Mendes of GALP addresses the Symposium
Bearing witness to the maturity and stature of the MIT Portugal Program within the research and development landscape in Portugal, the Second Annual MIT Portugal Conference was held on September 28, 2010, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, attracting more than 300 participants including students, researchers, and industry leaders.
The session featured the presence of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Mariano Gago, and several business leaders from established and startup Portuguese engineering companies, such as Galp, EDP, TMG, Novabase, Mota-Engil and Plux, that presented examples of several applied research projects being developed in collaboration between companies, Portuguese Universities and MIT in 3 main targeted application areas for research, namely: Electric Mobility, Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, and Intelligent Systems of Energy and Transportation applied to urban environments. The need to reinforce the industry-university linkage was a key message from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education in the conference, as cited in the many press notices of the event.
Tissue Engineering: Executive Digest, October 2010
