 Dr. Isabel Rocha Title: Assistant Professor, University of Minho, Bio-Engineering Focus Area MIT Portugal teaching activities: Computational Biosystems Sciences & Engineering, Leadership, BioTeams Current research/ research interests: Systems Biology, Bioinformatics and Metabolic Engineering Isabel Rocha has played an important role as part of the MIT Portugal Program’s Bio-engineering Systems group. She recently answered the following questions about her background and her thoughts on the program. MPP: What is your background (prior to MIT Portugal)? Rocha: I have a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from University of Minho and I did a Post-Doc at the Technical University of Denmark. MPP: What attracted you to the MIT Portugal Program? IR: The possibility of establishing research collaborations with researchers from MIT and also to participate in an innovative educational program made it attractive. MPP: What is unique about the program in comparison to other educational programs? IR: For a start, the collaboration with a leading world education and research institution: MIT. This gives us (faculty) and the students a unique opportunity for contact with state-of-the art educational methodologies and to take advantage of the contact with faculty from MIT. Also, this allows us to have a number of top students involved in the program from our universities and also from all over the world. All this together creates a unique, challenging and exciting environment. MPP: Are there new or different opportunities? IR: I think this opportunity is really unique both regarding education and scientific research. Even if other collaborations with MIT and other leading institutions existed in Portugal before the program, the impact was more limited, since the number of researchers and students involved was much smaller and there was not a structured framework to support such efforts. MPP: What do you do differently as a faculty member in this program? IR: This last 12 months I’ve been involved in the organization of several events related to the program, like the educational modules, the Bio-teams (which implied the organization of three different public events) and also the Biotechnology week that happened in University of Minho last May, also supported by IAPMEI (the Portuguese Institute that supports small and medium enterprises). Although sometimes the workload was quite high, I had the opportunity of meeting people from very different institutions (from MIT and also from a variety of Portuguese and European institutions) with very different backgrounds and experiences. I think this was very rewarding and greatly enriched my personal and professional experience. Definitely, I think I would not have this opportunity if I had a “typical” faculty position. | 
