Since its founding 19 years in the past as a pioneering collaboration with Portuguese universities, analysis establishments and companies, the MIT-Portugal Program (MPP) has achieved a slew of successes — from enabling 47 entrepreneurial spinoffs and funding over 220 joint tasks between MIT and Portuguese researchers to coaching a era of remarkable researchers on each side of the Atlantic.
In March, with practically 20 years of collaboration underneath their belts, MIT and the Portuguese Science and Know-how Basis (FCT) signed an settlement that formally launches this system’s subsequent chapter. Operating via 2030, MPP’s Section 4 will assist continued exploration of revolutionary concepts and options in fields starting from synthetic intelligence and nanotechnology to local weather change — each on the MIT campus and with companions all through Portugal.
“One of many benefits of getting a program that has gone on so lengthy is that we’re fairly effectively accustomed to one another at this level. Over time, we’ve realized one another’s techniques, strengths and weaknesses and we’ve been capable of create a synergy that may not have existed if we labored collectively for a brief time period,” says Douglas Hart, MIT mechanical engineering professor and MPP co-director.
Hart and John Hansman, the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and MPP co-director, are desperate to take this system’s current analysis tasks additional, whereas including new areas of focus recognized by MIT and FCT. Often known as the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in Portugal, FCT is the nationwide public company supporting analysis in science, expertise and innovation underneath Portugal’s Ministry of Training, Science and Innovation.
“Over the previous 20 years, the partnership with MIT has constructed a basis of belief that has fostered collaboration amongst researchers and the event of tasks with vital scientific affect and contributions to the Portuguese financial system,” Fernando Alexandre, Portugal’s minister for training, science, and innovation, says. “On this new section of the partnership, working from 2025 to 2030, we count on even larger ambition and affect — elevating Portuguese science and its capability to rework the financial system and enhance our society to even increased ranges, whereas serving to to handle the challenges we face in areas akin to local weather change and the oceans, digitalization, and house.”
“Worldwide collaborations just like the MIT-Portugal Program are completely very important to MIT’s mission of analysis, training and repair. I’m thrilled to see this system transfer into its subsequent section,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “MPP provides our college and college students alternatives to work in distinctive analysis environments the place they not solely make new findings and be taught new strategies but in addition contribute to fixing pressing native and world issues. MPP’s work within the realm of ocean science and local weather is a first-rate instance of how worldwide partnerships like this will help clear up vital human issues.”
Sharing MIT’s dedication to tutorial independence and excellence, Kornbluth provides, “the establishments and researchers we accomplice with via MPP improve MIT’s capability to realize its mission, enabling us to pursue the exacting requirements of mental and inventive distinction that make MIT a cradle of innovation and world chief in scientific discovery.”
The epitome of an efficient worldwide collaboration, MPP has stayed true to its mission and continued to ship outcomes right here within the U.S. and in Portugal for practically 20 years — prevailing amid myriad shifts within the political, social, and financial panorama. The multifaceted program encompasses an annual analysis convention and academic summits akin to an Innovation Workshop at MIT every June and a Marine Robotics Summer season Faculty within the Azores in July, in addition to pupil and college exchanges that facilitate collaborative analysis. In the course of the third section of this system alone, 59 MIT college students and 53 college and researchers visited Portugal, and MIT hosted 131 college students and 49 college and researchers from Portuguese universities and different establishments.
In every roughly five-year section, MPP researchers deal with a handful of core analysis areas. For Section 3, MPP superior cutting-edge analysis in 4 strategic areas: local weather science and local weather change; Earth techniques: oceans to close house; digital transformation in manufacturing; and sustainable cities. Inside these broad areas, MIT and FCT researchers labored collectively on quite a few small-scale tasks and a number of other giant “flagship” ones, together with improvement of Portugal’s CubeSat satellite tv for pc, a collaboration between MPP and a number of other Portuguese universities and firms that marked the nation’s second satellite tv for pc launch and the primary in 30 years.
Whereas work within the Section 3 fields will proceed throughout Section 4, researchers may even flip their consideration to 4 extra areas: chips/nanotechnology, power (a earlier focus in Section 2), synthetic intelligence, and house.
“We’re opening up the aperture for added collaboration areas,” Hansman says.
Along with specializing in distinct topic areas, every section has emphasised the varied components of MPP’s mission to differing levels. Whereas Section 3 accentuated collaborative analysis greater than instructional exchanges and entrepreneurship, these two facets shall be given extra weight underneath the Section 4 settlement, Hart mentioned.
“We’ve approval in Section 4 to deliver plenty of Portuguese college students over, and our principal investigators will profit from shut collaborations with Portuguese researchers,” he says.
The longevity of MPP and the latest launch of Section 4 are proof of this system’s worth. This system has performed a task within the instructional, technological and financial progress Portugal has achieved over the previous 20 years, as effectively.
“The Portugal of right this moment is remarkably stronger than the Portugal of 20 years in the past, and lots of the locations the place they’re stronger have been impacted by this system,” says Hansman, pointing to sustainable cities and “inexperienced” power, specifically. “We are able to’t take direct credit score, however we’ve been a part of Portugal’s journey ahead.”
Since MPP started, Hart provides, “Portugal has grow to be rather more entrepreneurial. Many, many, many extra start-up firms are popping out of Portuguese universities than there was once.”
A latest evaluation of MPP and FCT’s different U.S. collaborations highlighted plenty of constructive outcomes. The report famous that collaborations with MIT and different US universities have enhanced Portuguese analysis capacities and promoted organizational upgrades within the nationwide R&D ecosystem, whereas offering Portuguese universities and firms with alternatives to interact in complicated tasks that may have been tough to undertake on their very own.
Relating to MIT specifically, the report discovered that MPP’s long-term collaboration has spawned the institution of sustained doctoral packages and pointed to a marked shift inside Portugal’s instructional ecosystem towards globally aligned requirements. MPP, it reported, has facilitated the training of 198 Portuguese PhDs.
Portugal’s universities, college students and firms will not be alone in benefitting from the analysis, networks, and financial exercise MPP has spawned. MPP additionally delivers distinctive worth to MIT, in addition to to the broader US science and analysis neighborhood. Among the many program’s constant themes over time, for instance, is “joint curiosity within the Atlantic,” Hansman says.
This summer time, Faial Island within the Azores will host MPP’s fifth annual Marine Robotics Summer season Faculty, a two-week course open to 12 Portuguese Grasp’s and first 12 months PhD college students and 12 MIT upper-level undergraduates and graduate college students. The course, which incorporates lectures by MIT and Portuguese college and different researchers, workshops, labs and hands-on experiences, “is all the time my favourite,” mentioned Hart.
“I get to work with a few of the greatest researchers on this planet there, and a few of the prime college students popping out of Woods Gap Oceanographic Establishment, MIT, and Portugal,” he says, including that a few of his earlier Marine Robotics Summer season Faculty college students have come to check at MIT after which gone on to grow to be professors in ocean science.
“So, it’s been thrilling to see the expansion of scholars popping out of that program, definitely a constructive affect,” Hart says.
MPP supplies one-of-a-kind alternatives for ocean analysis as a result of distinctive marine amenities obtainable in Portugal, together with not solely open ocean off the Azores but in addition Lisbon’s deep-water port and a Portuguese Naval facility simply south of Lisbon that’s obtainable for collaborative analysis by worldwide scientists. Like MIT, Portuguese universities are additionally strongly invested in local weather change analysis — a discipline of examine keenly associated to ocean techniques.
“The worldwide collaboration has allowed us to check and additional develop our analysis prototypes in numerous aquaculture environments each within the US and in Portugal, whereas constructing on the distinctive experience of our Portuguese college collaborator Dr. Ricardo Calado from the College of Aveiro and our business collaborators,” says Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Profession Improvement Affiliate Professor in MIT’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science and Mechanical Engineering and chief of the Human-Pc Interplay Group on the MIT Pc Science and Synthetic Intelligence Lab.
Mueller factors to the work of MIT mechanical engineering PhD pupil Charlene Xia, a Marine Robotics Summer season Faculty participant, whose analysis is aimed toward creating a cost-effective system to observe the microbiome of seaweed farms and halt the unfold of dangerous micro organism related to ocean warming. Along with taking part in the summertime faculty as a pupil, Xia returned to the Azores for 2 subsequent years as a instructing assistant.
“The MIT-Portugal Program has been a key enabler of our analysis on monitoring the aquatic microbiome for potential illness outbreaks,” Mueller says.
As MPP enters its subsequent section, Hart and Hansman are optimistic about this system’s persevering with success on each side of the Atlantic and envision broadening its affect going ahead.
“I feel, at this level, the analysis goes very well, and we’ve acquired lots of connections. I feel one in all our targets is to broaden not the science of this system essentially, however the teams concerned,” Hart says, noting that MPP might have a much bigger presence in technical fields akin to AI and micro-nano manufacturing, in addition to in social sciences and humanities.
“We’d prefer to contain many extra folks and new folks right here at MIT, in addition to in Portugal,” he says, “in order that we will attain a bigger slice of the inhabitants.”
