Luís O. Silva is Professor of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico,
Lisbon, with PhD (1997) and Habilitation (2006) from IST, and post-doc
at UCLA (1997-2001). He was awarded two ERC Advanced Grants (2010 and
2015), among other prizes/honors. He is a Fellow of the American
Physical Society, Global Young Academy, and the European Physical
Society.

José M Viegas was Full Professor of Transportation at the University of Lisbon until July 2012, where he was Head of the Research unit of Transport Infrastructure, Systems and Policy and the national Director of the Transport Focus Area of the MIT-Portugal program.

Between August 2012 and August 2017 he was Secretary-general of the ITF (International Transport Forum at the OECD), an intergovernmental organization with 59 member countries. At the ITF he led a program of structural reform and brought it to the forefront of innovation in transport policy, strongly increasing collaboration with both the corporate and the institutional parts of the transport sector.  Some of the ITF reports have become worldwide references in their respective domains.

In 2003, he was founder and first Director General of Transportnet, a group of 8 leading European Universities with Advanced Studies in Transportation and he was Vice-president of the World Conference on Transport Conference Society, from 1998 to 2007.

He was also founder and CEO of TIS.pt one the main Portuguese transport consultancies.

As the Chief Technology Officer at 2getthere, Sjoerd van der Zwaan is responsible for  the technology roadmap within the company and leads the engineering teams based at the Utrecht headquarters. Sjoerd has a background in Robotics and Computer Vision and has a solid experience in the industry having managed engineering and software development teams within that field. Within 2getthere, Sjoerd works on solutions for smart mobility of the future, based on shared autonomous vehicles as part of public transport, focusing on the development of new technologies for perception, localisation, motion planning and v2x communications, which goes hand in hand with safety, system reliability and service levels. The company deployed world’s first permanent level 4 automated system already in 2006 (Parkshuttle Rotterdam) where it continues to transport 2000 persons per day, having transported millions of passengers already and exceeding a million km in mileage with a fleet of  6 robotic shuttle buses. Currently, the company is testing its latest 3rd generation robotic shuttle bus dedicated to a new reference project in the middle east and the renewal of the Parkshuttle in Rotterdam. The latter will be transformed in the world’s first autonomous system operating on public roads without a safety driver or steward on board.

Mário Lino da Silva was born on 1978 and has been a Space exploration enthusiast since his early childhood. His goal of participating in Mankind’s 21st Century endeavour of Space exploration endeavour led him to achieve a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from the Université of Orléans in 2004. Since 2005, he has been an Assistant Researcher at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, an Associated Laboratory of IST, and an Invited Assitant Professor in the Department of Physics at IST.

His research work focuses on the modelling and experimental validation of high-speed atmospheric entry plasmas, with an emphasis on the understanding of nonequilibrium physical-chemical processes which are key to the sizing of planetary exploration Spacecraft thermal protections. He has participated in all European planetary landing missions to date: The successful entry and descent of the Huygens spacecraft in Titan’s atmosphere (2005), and the successful entry and failed descent of the EXOMARS Schiaparelli spacecraft in Mars atmosphere (2016).

He is the manager of the Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory, the largest Space research facility in Portugal, where the European shock-Tube for High Enthalpy Research – ESTHER is currently being commissioned. This facility -funded by the European Space Agency- is a world-class facility capable of reproducing atmospheric entry flows at velocities in excess of 10km/s. Over the next 30 years, she will support future European planetary exploration missions, leading to a Manned Mars mission.

Diogo Alves was born in Barreiro, in 1976.  He concluded his bachelor degree in Technological Physics Engineering in IST in 2001 and the MSc in Physics in 2004 while working as a fellow researcher at IPFN.  In 2009 he joined the Plasma Operations Group at the Joint European Torus, in the UK, and in 2014 he concluded the PhD in Technological Physics Engineering at IST.  Later in 2014 he was offered a position at CERN where he currently works as an applied physicist

After finishing her Biological Engineer MSc in 2007, Tânia was invited to do her PhD thesis on Biotechnology at the Biological Sciences Research Group – IST, while lecturing practical classes and co-coordinating MSc students. In 2011, she continued her research career with a Post Doc at the same group (FCT fellowship). Between 2007 and 2013, she contributed to several national and international research projects, counting with more than 10 peer-reviewed publications.

In 2013 she felt the needed to look for new challenges and wanted to enter the industrial market. She took the opportunity to start working at Philip Morris International, where she already done work in several departments (e.g. supply chain and production team management). Tânia is now a part of the European Maintenance community, managing a team of engineers at Tabaqueira, PMI Portuguese affiliate

Rita Domingues holds a PhD in Bioengineering Systems from Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and obtained under the MIT-Portugal Program. For that reason, Rita developed her studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a total of 19 months. From her work in the area of Biomechanics, namely in the development of solutions to assist patients with impaired gait, resulted cutting-edge and innovative work in the area of ankle biomechanics, skin strain analysis and robotic technology. Rita holds a master degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of Coimbra, Portugal, and an executive masters in Bioengineering Systems from MIT-Portugal Program. Her recent working experience was at LaserLeap Technologies, a start-up company from Coimbra focused on the development of solutions to facilitate dermal delivery, in which she ran the Instrumentation laboratory.

Her main interests include the fields of technological innovation, healthcare, biomechanics, biomedical devices and technologies and R&D.

Paulo Rosa holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST and is a Project Manager at the Flight Systems Business Unit of DEIMOS Engenharia. His fields of expertise include robust adaptive control, GNC, and FDIR. He is currently the project manager of the ESA PROBA-3 RendezVous Experiment and provides technical and management support to several other projects within the realm of Space applications, including ESA MSRNAV and ESA CLGADR. He has been responsible for the development and implementation of FDI and FTC algorithms applied to a large commercial AIRBUS aircraft, within the FP7 RECONFIGURE project, and the design of high-robustness controllers for a hypersonic vehicle, within the FP7 HYPMOCES project. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in GNC, FDI, FTC, control theory, and distributed systems.

Carlos (Miguel Teixeira)

As Delivery Manager was involved in Complex Core Banking Projects in Portugal and Norway were worked for 2 years.
On 2008 joined everis,(a Multinational Consultant Company with Presence in more than 20 countries with 19.000 professionals working with the largest corporations in the world, developing and integrating IT systems and consultancy strategic projects. Everis Belongs to NTT Data, the 6th biggest IT company in the world with more than 120.000 professionals and 20BI dollars in Revenue ). Started in everis as head of Banking Sector, and assuming afterwards the responsibility for all non-financial Sectors. From 2014 until now is everis Portugal CEO, managing everis Business in Portugal and the internacional Nearshore and Excellence Digital Centers created on the last 2 years. Presently, everis has almost 800 People in Portugal on his responsibility. He is also member of everis Europe management Comity.
He is a Triathlon half and IronMan Athlete with presence in several internacional Age-Group Championships.

Teresa Monteiro graduated in Physics Engineering at IST in 1994. She completed a PhD in experimental High Energy Physics at the University of Hamburg in 1998, followed by a post-doc position at CERN. In 2001, Teresa made a move from academia to industry and joined Siemens R&D center in telecommunications in Lisbon, where she held different positions in SW Engineering, System Architecture and Product Management.

She is currently responsible for Network Planning portfolio at Coriant, a company developing Packet Optical Transport SDN-enabled end-to-end solutions. As a Product Manager, her mission is to champion for her customers and define the best products for R&D to build.

Joana Loureiro has a PhD in Physics Engineering, from Instituto Superior Técnico, since 2011 and although she went to Physics because of her Astrophysics passion, she has discovered the beauty of the nano-scale universe, the universe of Nanotechnologies. Her PhD work was developed at INESC-MN and has allowed her to apply her physics knowledge to the development of microfluidic platforms with health significance. Her thesis was entitled “Lab on chip microsystem for flow cytometric analysis, separation and counting of cells and particles”. From 2011 to 2017 she was a researcher at the Materials Department of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, from NOVA University, working on the development of new and eco-friendly thermoelectric materials, in the scope of several European Projects. Although this was an enthusiastic field, since 2017 she has embraced a new project and she is now a Senior R&D Engineer at Biosurfit, which fulfils her wish to work in the health and microfluidics area, in Portugal.