Politics

He was born in Lisbon in 1975. He has a Bachelor’s degree from the School of Communication and Media Studies, he worked on Canal Q, owned by Produções Fictícias, and is currently a scriptwriter and works on the RTP3 programme Last One Out Turns Off the Light. He is in charge of Communication at Cinema São Jorge and was a Communication Consultant at Booktailors. He works as a freelance illustrator and writes books as if there were no tomorrow.

Pedro Pita Barros is a full professor at the Nova School of Business and Economics, Nova University Lisbon, where he is the BPI | Fundação la Caixa Professor of Health Economics, and a member of the Economic and Social Council (voted Personality of Recognised Merit).
Pedro held the position of Vice-Rector of Nova University Lisbon (2013-2017) and he is a member of the EC Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health (EXPH) (the European Commission, by selection). He was the President of the European Health Economics Association (2013-2016) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Energy Services Regulator (2005-2006). He was also the President of the Portuguese Health Economics Association (1998-2000; 2009-2010), a member of the EC Mission Board for Cancer (the European Commission, by selection) (2019-2020), a member of the National Council of Ethics for Life Sciences (2015-2021) and a member of the National Health Council (representing the Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities) (2016-2021).
Pedro has been honoured as a Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry (Ordem do Infante D. Henrique) and with a gold medal for Distinguished Services, awarded by the Ministry of Health.
His research work is in the areas of health economics, economic regulation and competition policy. He acts as a consultant for public and private bodies in the same areas.

Last updated: August 2025

Associate Partner, EY-Parthenon Portugal, Ernst & Young, S.A. Leads EY-Parthenon's Government and Public Sector team. He is a visiting professor at the University of Lisbon, where he teaches Macroeconomics and Economic Policy. Throughout his 30 years of professional experience, he has coordinated studies and projects on regional and sector analysis, impact measurement and evaluation, foresight and regional planning, monitoring and follow-up of regional and sector plans and strategies, as well as specific studies on the Portuguese and European economies.

Assistant Professor at Nova University Lisbon. Her research focuses on institutional change in the European Union and coalition governments, subjects on which she has published articles in journals such as the European Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics and Party Politics. She has written "Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How coalition agreements constrain ministerial action" (Routledge, 2012) and "Changing rules of delegation: A contest of Power for comitology" (with A. Héritier, C. Bisschoff and C-F. Bergström, Oxford University Press, 2012). Her article "Explaining the European Parliament's Right to Appoint and Invest the Commission: Interstitial institutional change", published in West European Politics in 2007, was awarded the Vincent Wright Memorial Prize and the Gulbenkian Prize for the Internationalisation of Social Sciences. Among other subjects, she teaches Comparative Political Systems and European Union Institutions.

Last updated: May 2014

President of the European Association of Law & Economics. He is a Professor of Law at George Mason University in the United States and holds the Chair in Research Innovation at Católica Global Law School.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Nova University Lisbon, holds a Master's degree in Economics and Law (LL.M.) from the University of London and a PhD in Economics from the University of York, UK.
He joined the Executive Board of the American Society for Comparative Law (2021-2023), after having chaired the Spanish Association of Law and Economics between 2017 and 2021. He has taught at Texas A&M University (2015-2018), the University of Illinois (2007-2015), Nova University Lisbon (2001-2007) and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (1998-2001).
He was awarded the Julián Marías prize by the government of the Autonomous Community of Madrid in 2010. He has written more than 150 scientific articles published in international journals.
He was Chairman of the Board of Directors of Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos between 2014 and 2016 and has been a member of its Board of Trustees since 2018.

Last updated: January 2024

He is one of the world's most renowned statisticians, having gained prominence for his innovative analyses of political data. During the 2008 presidential elections, he correctly predicted the results of the primaries and the presidential winner in 49 states. In 2012, he repeated the feat for 50 of the 50 states.
He is considered a pioneer of the new field of data journalism with his website FiveThirtyEight. In partnership with ABC News, Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight have contributed to election coverage by continuing to apply statistical probability models to areas such as sports or science.
He is the author of the book «The Signal and The Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction», which made The New York Times best seller list.

Last updated: January 2022

Full professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Lisbon School of Medicine and obstetrician and gynaecologist at Santa Maria Hospital. He was the first elected president of the National Council for Ethics in Life Sciences (2009-2015), he is coordinator of three projects on sexual and reproductive health in the European Union (2003-2010) and was elected vice-president of the Bioethics department of the Council of Europe (2018-2019). He has published very widely on bioethics issues.

American philosopher and essayist, he is Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University, where he began teaching in 1980. After completing his undergraduate studies, he attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, before attaining his doctorate at Balliol College, Oxford, under the guidance of philosopher Charles Taylor, who was a profound influence on him. In 1980, he accepted an invitation to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where for decades he was in charge of the «Justice» course. With a total of over 15,000 students enrolled over the years, the course was one of the most widely-attended in Harvard’s history and was even recorded and put online for free access, obtaining millions of views. Included in «Foreign Policy's» list of 100 Global Thinkers, considered by Newsweek to be the «most relevant living philosopher» and an authentic «rock star», and by The New Republic as the «most famous philosophy professor on the planet», Michael Sandel postulates that philosophy should be taught through dialogue and only makes sense in close relation to everyday life, which is why he always tries to incorporate the context in which his discussions take place. His work has been translated into 27 languages and expressed in various books where moral reflection and the deepening of democratic life are irrevocably linked. His most recent bestseller, «What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets», is an invitation to readers to rethink the role that money and markets play in our lives and was named by Foreign Policy as one of the 20 must-read books of the year. He currently continues giving seminars on ethics and biotechnology and teaching the course «Ethics, Economics and the Law».

She was born in Angola on 10 June 1957. She got her PhD in Law (Constitutional Law) at the University of Lisbon School of Law.
She was minister of Home Affairs (2025-2026), an ombudswoman and professor at the Nova School of Law in Lisbon, with aggregation in legal and political sciences.
She has devoted her teaching and research career to the areas of constitutional law. She also teaches subjects such as comparative public law, fundamental rights and constitutional justice.
She was a judge in the Constitutional Court between April 2007 and July 2016, an institution of which she was vice-president between October 2012 and July 2016.
A member of several international scientific associations (including the Ibero-American Institute of Constitutional Law and the International Association of Constitutional Law), she has written a number of various works on her area of expertise since 1984.

Last updated: February 2026

He is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Humanities Department of the University of Lisbon, where he teaches political philosophy, the history of contemporary ideas and European studies. He holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from FLUL and conducted post-doctoral research on federalism (modern and contemporary thought). He is the author of several articles and books, including: «Reason and Liberty. The Political Thought of James Madison» (Esfera do Caos, 2012), «Challenges to Democratic Participation. Antipolitics, Deliberative Democracy, and Pluralism» (co-editor, Lexington Books, 2014) and «Contemporary Political Theories» (co-editor, Documenta, 2016). He regularly contributes to the media as a political commentator on US-related issues.