News

Over a two day period, from September 30th to October 1st, the first year PhD and Master’s students of the MIT Portugal Program had an in-depth, hands-on opportunity to learn about, and practice, how to become innovators and entrepreneurs. The session was organized by Luis Perez-Breva from MIT, and was based on his experience teaching innovation “hands-on” at MIT, within MIT-Portugal (through the bio-innovation module and Bio-Teams), and within other MIT international programs. In a truly “boot-camp” fashion, the participants deep-dived intensively, and in an interactive way, into the innovation theme.

And then there were four… Mediaomics, Greenlamp, All-desk and Musikki will compete at this year’s final of the ISCTE-IUL MIT-Portugal Venture Competition.

At a session that counted with the inspired entrepreneurship testimonies from Elazer Edelman (MIT/Edelman laboratory), António Murta (Pathena) and Edward Roberts (MIT Entrepreneurship Center), the International Jury Panel selected the 4 Finalists, who received a financial support of 100.000 Euro each.

Pedro Andrade has recently been awarded with a PhD in Bioengineering by Instituto Superior Técnico under the MIT Portugal Program. Together with 4 fellow PhD students, he found the company Cell2B in January of this year. Cell2B is giving its first steps into establishing itself as a biotechnology company dedicated to the development of a new line of healthcare therapies to prevent and treat organ rejection in patients undergoing organ or tissue transplants.

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.