MIT Portugal Innovation Workshop 2025 | Speakers

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 co-teaches a course at MIT on Creating Hardware Startups for Mechanical Engineers. She 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 tech startups expanding from Greece to the U.S. She is a Board Member of Berklee College of Music in Boston, as well as 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, and Mindspace Entrepreneurship Program.

She was Founding CEO of Z Corporation, an early leader in 3D printing out of MIT, and has served on numerous corporate boards, such as Cynosure (NASDAQ), a $400 million leader in the laser aesthetics market; GSI Group (NASDAQ, now called Novanta), 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, Santa Monica Review, 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.

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 Product and Design at Bose, leading cross-functional teams to define and develop the future portfolio the Premium Consumer business unit.

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.

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.

Dr. Dava Newman

Dr. Dava Newman is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. She’s also the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Harvard–MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member. She served as NASA Deputy Administrator (2015-17), the first female engineer in this role, and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Her research and teaching expertise include aerospace biomedical engineering, astronaut performance, advanced space suit design, leadership development, innovation and space policy. Newman has been principal investigator (PI) on four spaceflight missions flown aboard the Space Shuttle, Russian Mir Space Station and the International Space Station, and is best known for her revolutionary BioSuit™ planetary spacesuit. Recently, she co-founded EarthDNA with partner Guillermo Trotti to accelerate solutions for spaceship Earth’s Ocean, Land and Air subsystems by curating satellite data to make the world work for 100% of humanity.

Dip Patel

Dip Patel is a natural problem-solver with a passion for innovation and a track record of bridging technology and entrepreneurship. As CTO of Soluna (Nasdaq: SLNH), he leads efforts to transform wasted renewable energy into computing power. He oversees the design of Soluna’s cutting-edge modular data centers and their proprietary software platform, Maestro OS.

Previously, Dip co-founded Ecovent, a smart home technology startup acquired by ConnectM (Nasdaq: CNTM) in 2016. Earlier in his career, he played a pivotal role at Lockheed Martin, leading the design and development of advanced radar and missile defense systems.

Dip holds a BSEE from Drexel University, an MSEE from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from MIT Sloan, where he now serves as faculty teaching courses on Entrepreneurship.

Sorin Grama

Sorin is the co-founder and CEO of Transaera, a startup developing a new class of ultra-efficient air conditioning systems. Transaera is on a mission to cut the cost of ownership of air conditioners by more than half using a combination of novel materials and hardware designs.

Prior to Transaera, Sorin co-founded and served as CEO of Promethean Power Systems, a manufacturer and operator of cold-storage and refrigeration systems for preserving fruits, vegetables, and milk in emerging markets. He is the principal inventor of Promethean’s enabling technology, an energy storage device that provides effective backup in areas with unpredictable grid power. Tens of thousands of farmers in rural India are using this technology to reduce harvest spoilage and increase their income.

Sorin is also one of the founders of Greentown Labs, a grassroots effort which has grown to become the nation’s largest cleantech incubator. He is trained as an electrical engineer and holds an MS in Engineering and Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is originally from Romania.