Follow-up meeting with Flagships Projects

The remote meeting had over 70 participations. In attendance were all the research groups from PT institutions and from MIT, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor, the MPP Directores (Pedro Arezes, Zita Martins, Dava Newman and Doug Hart) as well as members of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), and National Innovation Agency (ANI).

At the welcome notes Pedro Arezes, Director of MIT Portugal Program, highlights the high relevance of these projects “for Portugal’s development in the MIT Portugal research domains”, adding that MIT Portugal is committed to ensure that these projects are succeeding. The MPP Director at MIT, Dava Newman, mentioned all the synergistic research between MIT and the PT research groups with weekly meeting contacts.

For Manuel Heitor these are really important projects which bring together many Portuguese researchers from different institutions, companies and also MIT researchers, working in new knowledge areas and important topics. “The projects should be used by the companies and researchers to stimulate other projects, to create jobs and to improve the Portuguese economy”, he added.  

The meeting proceeds with an overview presentation of each project consortium supported by national companies (NOS, EFACEC, Zenithwings, Ubiwhere, Stratosphere, DSTelecom and Edisoft,) which shared their project status: role of each partner, main activities, project achievements, budgets and next steps.

The 7 flagships projects are in very different stages, some already in a steady state, some in an acceleration phase and others that are starting. Zita Martins, Co-Director MIT Portugal Program, reiterated the importance of all the projects “get to a steady state as quickly as possible”. MIT Portugal and the Flagships Projects will meet again around March for another follow-up meeting.

More details about the MPP projects here!