This article profiles SES doctoral student Vasco Portugal. 
Vasco Portugal is a Second-year PhD student in the Sustainable Energy Systems program. His undergraduate studies in Architecture Design were pursued at the FAUTL in Lisbon, and he has an Advanced Architecture degree from IaaC-UPC in Barcelona, receiving his diploma in 2006. After graduating he moved to Italy, where he worked from 2006 to 2007 at Massimiliano Fuksas studio, in Rome. In 2008 he left for Barcelona, where he collaborated as a freelancer for a number of architecture studios while concluding a master in self-sufficient habitats at IaaC. During his studies he grew an interest in social, cultural and humanitarian design. His master thesis focused on social housing for Romania, through the use of passive design structured according to a pre-set number of rules of colonizing space. Subsequently, in 2009 he worked for Julien de Smedt Studio and ADEPT architecture in Copenhagen, addressing sustainability outcomes to promote sustainable planning. Presently he is deeply committed to explore how to achieve sustainable development while working on his PhD thesis. How did you learn about the MIT Portugal Program and what motivated you to apply for the SES PhD? The Institute of Advanced Architecture, where I did my Master, has strong links to the MIT, as they share some projects and its Fab Academy was part of the global network of Fab Labs affiliated to MIT’s Center for Bit and Atoms. I sought to pursue a PhD and had already learned about the MIT Portugal Program, so I guess it was a natural choice. I felt the need to acquire new knowledge, especially with a stronger economic/scientific component. These are characteristics that I felt the SES MIT Portugal Program would guarantee. I can’t imagine a better environment to develop my research than MIT. I am enormously grateful for this opportunity. What is your research project about and what do you hope to achieve? I'm very much focused in the area of network analysis and information management in a context of built environment sustainability and development. My efforts are directed to the creation of a system that would allow me to analyze data visually (through a graphical network) and explore the relation between its nodes, that could be (depending on the context) authors, keywords, energy profiles, projects or papers, in such a way that a user may perform a complex search to explore how the information is scattered properly through the structure and also to detect the emergencies, objections and other characteristics of the network. I have created a platform called Greenwabii to test my line of research. This is a platform of information for sustainable development and built environment issues in a developing context. This network is set to stimulate and appraise the development and use of sustainable solutions in developing or under develop countries. I intend to use Greenwabii as a test ground for experimenting this scientifically-based tool, i.e. Fab labs are starting to be distributed in developing countries and they have a good potential to generate local technical solutions and enable localized consumer markets. Information communities could emerge in a structure like Greenwabii for sharing fabrication designs that could provide urgent solutions in these developing contexts. What are the major benefits of this project on peoples’ lives? The possibility to manage large amounts of information through relations opens a new paradigm based on systems thinking that can help to advance on the necessary pathway to sustainability. We are hardly going to change or destroy all the problematic buildings/spaces anytime soon, urban form just doesn’t change that quickly, but the profound changes in the way built environments feel and function may be in this internet-enabled informational layer. When the main focus is not direct financial gain but social gain, what’s the benefit in keeping all the information to you? I want to be able to distribute that information and allow this practice to be the innovation. How do you see this area evolving in the future? Every day we deal with incredible amounts of information and I trust that this approach is the future of information display. In the future, new factors could be taken into consideration, specifically changes over time and space, and then network analysis could discover things like changes in research over time, author evolution and mobility within communities. That's very valuable information that the present networks have barely begun to tackle capturing. How you think this kind of research projects/ international partnerships can contribute and cause impact in Portugal’s economic development? Portugal started recently to develop an array of ambitious renewable energy projects, but I consider that this network of information can comprise two factors that have enough weight on the paradigm of energy and also contribute positively through indirect gains to the economy of any country: it includes a set of measures aiming at an increase in energy efficiency and employment of intelligent buildings. This line of research can also be adapted to a marketable context, for example through an information panel equipment for home domotic or a smart grid where we could access to profiles of consumption and analyze the various inputs and outputs of these intakes. What do you hope to do once you complete your degree? I aspire to pursue an academic career in research and teaching -- teaching students is one of my main aspirations –, but I also would like to have the opportunity to merge areas such as architecture, engineering and economy on a professional context. | 
