MIT Portugal Innovation Workshop 2024 | Speakers

Fernando Alexandre

Fernando Alexandre is Portugal’s Minister of Education, Science, and Innovation. He holds a PhD in Economics from Birkbeck College, University of London and is an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the University of Minho. He was Pro-Rector, Head of the School of Business and Economics, and Director of the Department of Economics. He was also the Vice-President of Conselho Económico e Social, member of the direction of Instituto +Liberdade, and Secretary of State in the Portuguese Government from 2013 to 2015. His research interests are macroeconomics, financial markets and the Portuguese economy. He authored or co-authored eight books, several book chapters and papers in journals such as Labour Economics, Journal of Technology Transfer, Regional Studies, The World Economy, Open Economies Review, Economics Letters, CESifo Economic Studies or Higher Education. He has acted as a consultant for private and public institutions, including the European Commission and the Portuguese Government. In 2022, he was awarded the University of Minho Scientific Merit Prize.

Isabel Gonçalves Folhadela Furtado

CEO of TMG Automotive, a manufacturer of soft, flexible materials for car interiors.
Member of the Board of Directors of all companies within TMG Group

Holds a degree in Economics by the University of Manchester, England, with post grad in Textile Technology, UMIST, Manchester

2018 – 2022 Chairman of COTEC Portugal, the Portuguese National Association for Innovation, whose honorary president is Professor Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

Currently holds the following positions:
Vice presidente of ATP (Portuguese Textile Association
Member of the Executive Board of COTEC
Member of Board of Curators ( University of Minho )
President of the Board of Directors of CEIIA ( Engineer Centre for Automotive and Aeronautics)
President of General Assembly of Family Business Association (APEF)
Member of the Chancelaria das Ordens Honorificas – Merit Orders of Portugal
Member of the Governance Committee of MIT- Portugal Program

Recognitions/Awards

• 2014 – awarded with Industrial Order of Comendador insignia by the President of Portugal
• 2019 – awarded with Prémio D. Antónia Ferreira, a prize that distinguishes women for their accomplishments and career
• 2020 – awarded with BPI La Caixa – Business Woman of the Year
• 2020 – awarded with IWEC Foundation– International Women Council Award
• 2021 – awarded with the Master de Oro of the Real Forum de Alta Direcion
• 2022 – awarded with the Grã-Cruz of the Order of D. Henrique of Portugal
• 2023 – awarded with Premio Executiva

Christina Chase

Christina Chase is a Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and serves as its Managing Director.

Prior to this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Christina has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community and in 2014, Mashable named her one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene.

In MIT’s School of Engineering, Christina leads the one of the largest undergraduate entrepreneurship classes, Entrepreneurship in Engineering. She helped start and co-direct, StartMIT (formerly Start6), an entrepreneurship bootcamp, with Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. She has served as the Academic Advisor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s 2A Entrepreneurship Track and as an advisor for the Design of Medical Devices and Precision Machine Design classes and has lectured on innovation in the Department of Material Science in their senior capstone design class Materials Projects Laboratory, where students create the next generation of groundbreaking materials, as well as mentored for the MADMEC Material Science Design Competition. She has also taught Applications in Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques, where advanced MIT startup teams are helped to accelerate growth over the semester.

Christina is an entrepreneur with a track record of success in a several industries, starting her first company when she was 18 years old. Most recently she was the CEO and co-founder of Firehoze, an education technology company that focused on online education that involved over a hundred instructors from the most prestigious universities. She has worked with numerous founding teams across industries, including B2B hardware, healthcare IT, materials and coatings, and consumer electronics, and has also led innovation in established companies, such as the photonics company, Labsphere, where as the Director of the Materials and Coating division, in under a year she tripled revenue and led the group to file three key patents for new materials.

Christina is a Techstars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, is a judge for the SXSW Accelerator Competition and former Advisory Board member. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community.

In a past life, Christina was a cyclist where she was one of 12 women selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding.

Doug Hart

Douglas P. Hart is an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and co-founder of three venture backed biotechnology companies. Doug has a history of successful inventions from within and outside of academia and serves as a technical advisor for numerous companies and professional organizations. He has been involved in the commercial development of technologies ranging from satellite propulsion and unmanned drones to surgical robots. Doug received his BSc degree in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from the University of Illinois, his S.M. degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Nuno Arantes-Oliveira

Nuno Arantes‐Oliveira, Ph.D. is an entrepreneur, investor and academic with a scientific background and an interest in innovation, particularly in the Life Sciences, Healthcare, and Blue Economy. Nuno began his career as a graduate student working on the genetics of aging at UCSF, where his research led to the largest lifespan extension ever observed in any living being and a string of high-impact papers. For the next twenty years, Nuno founded and/or served as CEO of numerous companies in Europe and the U.S., in fields including technology transfer, drug development, genomics, healthcare services, and seafood production. With these companies Nuno won major international awards, raised tens of millions of euros/dollars, and in several cases achieved high-multiple transactions. Nuno has negotiated and implemented business and scientific collaborations in four continents, and for many years held top industry positions including that of President, and later Chairman, of P-BIO – Portugal’s Biotechnology Industry Organization. He has also acted as an advisor to foundations and governmental agencies, and has coached over 25 public and private companies in the framework of the prestigious European Innovation Council (EIC) grant programs. From 2018 to 2021, Nuno was Chairman of the Investment Committee of 200M, a State-backed co-investment fund, and since 2023 he has sat on the Technical Investment Committee of FdCR, a €1.3 billion Portuguese fund of funds. In the meantime, he founded and became a Partner of CRV, a venture fund investing in disruptive clinical-stage technologies. Keeping one foot in academia, Nuno worked with the MIT‐Portugal Program (2015-18) and is now an adjunct professor at NOVA School of Business and Economics (NOVA-SBE), where he teaches science-based entrepreneurship and innovation.

Marina Hatsopoulos

Marina Hatsopoulos is Board Chair of Levitronix Technologies, the worldwide leader in magnetically-levitated bearingless motor technology, and President of Hellenic Innovation Network, which serves as a bridge for startups expanding from Greece to the U.S. She is a Board Member of ALBA Business School and Athens College, both in Greece, and on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is founding advisor of MIT startup Inkbit. She is on the Advisory Board of the Nantucket Conference, MIT Enterprise Forum Greece (now called StartSmart SEE), Eurobank’s EGG accelerator, Mindspace Entrepreneurship Program and MIT ReACT. She was Founding CEO of Z Corporation, an early leader in 3D printing out of MIT, and has served on numerous corporate boards, both public and private. She was a Director of Cynosure Inc., a $400 million leader in the laser aesthetics market; GSI Group, a $300 million supplier of laser-based equipment; and Contex Holding, a $100 million leading manufacturer of large-format scanners.

She speaks regularly on topics related to entrepreneurship at MIT, Brown, and other institutions, and profiles about her have run in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Boston Business Journal, Boston Magazine, and Technology Review. Her business writing has appeared in Venturebeat, The Observer, CEO World Magazine, Design News, Time Compression Technologies, and Jumpstart: Launching Your Business Venture, Profitably and Successfully (Aspatore, 2003). She was Speaker, Tedx. She has also written prize-winning essays and short stories which have been published in Antioch Review, Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary, and other literary journals. She holds B.A. degrees from Brown University in Math and in Music, and an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering.

Reed Sturtevant

Reed is a General Partner at Engine Ventures. He serves as a Board Member for Anthology, Amide, Atlantic Quantum Computing, Axoft, Celestial AI, Hyperlight, Sync Computing and The Routing Company.

Reed was a founder and Managing Director at Project 11 Ventures and Techstars Boston. He attended MIT and has a background in software. Reed ran Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge and was VP of Technology at Idealab, Boston. Early in his career, he created Freelance Graphics which was acquired by Lotus Development Corp. He has been a lecturer at MIT Sloan and is a frequent speaker at MIT entrepreneurship courses and programs.

Gary Schall

Gary Schall helps entrepreneurs and emerging companies navigate the many legal issues they face, from formation to equity, safe and note financings through exit events. He also represents venture capital funds in their investments in startups and high-growth companies. His clients are technology-based and span a broad range of industries, including e-commerce, mobile technologies, hardware, software, wearables, biotechnology and diagnostics. In the 2023 edition of The Legal 500 United States, Mr. Schall was recognized as a “Leading Lawyer” for his M&A/Corporate and Commercial: Venture Capital and Emerging Companies practice. In 2024, he was nominated by clients and selected as a Thomson Reuters’ “Stand-out Lawyer.”

Melissa Pickering

Melissa Pickering is the Senior Director of Consumer Product Management at Bose, leading a team of cross-functional product leaders to define and develop the future product portfolio of headphones, earbuds and speakers.

Prior to Bose, Melissa held leadership roles across CPG, edtech, and medtech industries at scales ranging from startup to global corporation. She began her career as a mechanical engineer for Disney Imagineering, which inspired her to launch an edtech startup to ignite a future generation of engineers. After her startup was acquired, she relocated to The LEGO Group’s global headquarters in Denmark to establish and lead a new digital product team and operating model. During the pandemic she relocated back to the states to join the executive leadership team of a late stage medtech startup that created a new market category with the first wearable breast pump. Here she led the product team across software and hardware to expand the product portfolio into new categories for the business. Melissa has shared her purpose-driven product beliefs on the TEDx stage and actively engages in the product community as both a podcast host and coach at the Entrepreneurship Center of Tufts University, her alma matter.

Elaine Chen

Elaine is the Cummings Professor of the Practice in Entrepreneurship and Director of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts. Elaine is the Academic Director for the popular undergraduate Entrepreneurship Minor, where she also teaches multiple courses. She oversees all co-curricular programming, including 1×1 coaching, workshops, a summer accelerator and more. Under her leadership, the Center has grown rapidly and now attracts students with diverse professional interests and career plans, including historically underrepresented groups. Prior to joining Tufts, Elaine served as Senior Lecturer and Entrepreneur-in-Residence for nearly a decade at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, teaching entrepreneurship in startup, corporate, non-profit and government settings. Elaine founded and led the implementation of multiple academic and co-curricular offerings at MIT. She coached hundreds of students every year, and spearheaded the development of digital infrastructure that used technology to scale up equitable access to entrepreneurship education – on and off campus. Elaine plays an active role in entrepreneurship enablement in the community. She received the MIT Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurship Mentoring in recognition of her impact on entrepreneurship education. She was selected by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and Lemelson Foundation to serve as an Invention Ambassador. She also served on the board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge (now known as the eForum). She is currently a Board Director at the Center for Open Science. Elaine brings a wealth of experience to Tufts, having served as an engineering and product management VP at six companies, including Rethink Robotics, Zeo, Zeemote and SensAble Technologies. She has brought numerous hardware and software products to market and holds 22 patents. As Founder and Managing Director of ConceptSpring, a corporate innovation and entrepreneurship consulting company, Elaine helps corporate leaders build entrepreneurial organizations via innovation consulting in companies spanning healthcare, industrial automation, FinTech, non-profits, government agencies and more. As a thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Elaine has been featured in Xconomy, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Forbes and Fortune. She is author of Bringing a Hardware Product to Market: Navigating the Wild Ride from Concept to Mass Production. She has extensive international experience with particular expertise in the Asia-Pacific area. Elaine received her BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sridhar Lyengar

Sridhar is the founder and Chair of Elemental Machines, makers of smart IoT products for the life sciences industry. He previously was a founder of Misfit who developed elegant wearable products, which was acquired by Fossil in 2015 for $260M. Sridhar also founded AgaMatrix, a blood glucose monitoring company that made the world’s first medical device connecting directly to the iPhone and shipped 15+ FDA-cleared medical products, 2B+ biosensors, 6M+ glucose meters, with partnerships with Apple, Sanofi, and Walgreens. Sridhar holds over 100 US and international patents and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar. He has been known to run 13.1 miles on occasion and has sometimes been spotted on stage behind a wall of drums.

Dulcie Madden

Dulcie Madden is an experienced startup founder and operator, who has led sales, commercialization, and management teams. Most recently, she was Partner & Head of Partnerships at The Engine, an MIT-affiliated early stage investment fund. Prior to that, she co-founded and was CEO of Rest Devices, a startup that used sensors, hardware, and data-driven software to help families sleep better. Rest launched the first wearable baby monitor in multiple nationwide chains and also worked with Johnson and Johnson on multiple digital sleep products.

Dulcie also worked in India for five years scaling programs for maternal health and women’s livelihood development. She holds a BS in Biology from Georgetown University, an MPH from Boston University, and half of an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Pedro Rocha Vieira

Pedro is deeply passionate about fostering impactful innovation on a collective scale and nurturing vibrant innovation ecosystems. Sustainability and human development are at the core of my interests and drive.

As the co-founder and global CEO of Beta-i, a renowned collective innovation consultancy with offices in Boston, Brussels, Lisbon, and São Paulo, We’ve spearheaded initiatives that have empowered over 10,000 entrepreneurs and facilitated 1,000 innovation pilots with numerous corporations worldwide. Our focus areas encompass energy transition, circular economy, blue economy, and smart cities.

With a track record as a serial entrepreneur, I’ve ventured into diverse fields including coworking, education, venture capital, events, and circularity.

I’m an avid writer on topics of innovation and entrepreneurship, having co-authored two books. Additionally, I serve as a board member and co-founder of several global non-profit organizations.

Outside the realm of work, I find joy in travel, literature, cycling, high-intensity training, yoga, and meditation. Above all, I’m immensely grateful for my role as a father to two remarkable boys and for being happily married to the love of my life, my soulmate.