Science

Gonçalo Saraiva Matias is the Minister Adjunct and for State Reform of the XXV Constitutional Government. He was Chairman of the Board of Directors and of the Executive Committee of the Foundation between september 2022 and june 2025.
He was a professor at the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Portugal, where he also obtained his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees.
He was director of the Catholic Global School of Law and visiting professor at Washington University. He conducted research at the Georgetown University Law School as a Fulbright visiting scholar. Most of his work falls within Regulatory, Administrative, Constitutional and International Law. He was the director of the Migration Observatory, Secretary of State for the Administrative Modernisation of the XX Constitutional Government. He has been advisor for legal affairs to the President of the Portuguese Republic since 2008. In 2016, he was awarded the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Infante D. Henrique. He was born in Lisbon, in 1979.

Last uptade: june 2025

He has a PhD in Biology from the University of Porto and his main research interests are linked to Evolutionary Biology. Full Professor in the Biology Department of the University of Porto School of Sciences, where he teaches Genetics and Evolution. Director of CIBIO – Biodiversity and Genetic Resources Research Centre and of the Associated Laboratory InBIO – Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology Research Network. In recent years, he has established a network of collaborative laboratories in several African countries, called TwinLabs, whose strategic objectives are scientific and technological training, advanced human resources training and knowledge transfer. In 2017, UNESCO awarded the Life on Land Chair to the University of Porto, with the aim of promoting and coordinating this network of TwinLabs, with Nuno Ferrand holding the Chair. Coordinator of the European project BIOPOLIS, recently approved by the European Commission, which results in the mobilisation of the largest amount of funding ever awarded to a research centre in Portugal. Director of the Museum of Science and Natural History at the University of Porto where, in partnership with the Portuguese Science Promotion Agency Ciência Viva, he created the Biodiversity Gallery.

She is Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine, where she has worked as Lead Researcher since 2005, the same year she started teaching at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lisbon.
Although her research addresses various fields, her primary focus is malaria and the mechanisms that cause the infection to develop into a deadly disease.
With a PhD in Molecular Parasitology from University College London in the UK and a Master's in Immunology from the University of Porto, she has worked in scientific research centres such as the Gulbenkian Institute of Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA.
With over 100 publications and four patents, she has received dozens of national and international awards – including the Pessoa Prize (2013) and the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Prize (2018).

Last updated: May 2023

Full Professor in Education Sciences at the University of Coimbra School of Psychology and Education Sciences. She did her PhD and aggregation in Educational Psychology at the University of Coimbra. She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses, coordinated some of these courses and supervised numerous Master’s and PhD dissertations. Her research interests focus mainly on instruction and school learning, areas to which much of her published work refers (books, book chapters, articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings). It has also been in these areas that she has been working very hard on research projects, coordinating them or joining the teams in question.

She is Rector of Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, where she headed the Scientific Council and Researcher at Iscte’s Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte).
She was Minister of Education between 2005 and 2009 and chaired the Board of Directors of the Luso-American Development Foundation between 2010 and 2013.
She chaired the Science and Technology Observatory of the Ministry of Science and Technology. She has published several works, especially on the sociology of professions, information society and public policy.

Last updated: May 2023

Founder and CEO of the communications company Empower Sports and presenter on the Eleven Sports channel. He began his career at RTP, later working for CNN (in the US and later as a correspondent in London), Sport TV and UEFA. He has also worked with FIFA and the Portuguese Football Federation.

Last updated: January 2022

She has been a researcher at CIBIO-InBIO since 2004. With a PhD in Biology from the University of Porto in 2011, she has been carrying out scientific and human training work in the PALOP since 2006. In addition to having published more than 30 articles in indexed journals, she has produced and participated in various science dissemination activities, such as documentaries and books. She embraced this project because she believes in the power of communication combined with scientific accuracy.

Last updated: March 2022

Science communication consultant and press columnist. He has been a journalist for most of his professional life. He worked for the weekly Expresso and the daily Público, of which he was one of the founders, where he created the first daily science section in the Portuguese press and founded the newspaper's website. He has devoted himself to training journalists and teaching science communication at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as providing a stage for science and technology.

He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, he is a professor of Economics at Nova SBE and a researcher at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London.
His research focuses on a wide range of topics, going from the relationship between democracy and economic growth to the macroeconomic cost of gender discrimination and has been published in several academic journals, such as the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and in works published by Harvard University Press, MIT Press, Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press.
His academic work has been commented on in publications such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Handelsblatt and La Repubblica, and discussed on specialised opinion article sites such as Vox.eu and Eurointelligence.
He was co-editor, with Francesco Caselli and Mário Centeno, of «After the Crisis: Reform, Recovery and Growth in Europe», and author of the essay «Europe Is Not a Foreign Country», a discussion on the past and future of Europe as an idea.

Last updated: October 2023

He holds a Master's degree in Network and Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Porto School of Sciences (2015). He is attached to the Centre for Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS-INESC TEC) and worked on the Authenticus project. He received a scholarship under the PhD programme in Computer Science. Her thesis focuses on the use of bibliographic networks to address the problem associated with creating a scientific profile for researchers, as well as the development of author rankings in bibliographic databases.