First Flagship Projects meeting of 2021
This week, March 8th, MIT Portugal meet with all the 7 Flagship Projects for the 1st follow-up meeting of the year and the 3rd since the start of these meetings.
In attendance were all the research groups from PT institutions and MIT, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor, the MPP Directors ( Pedro Arezes, Dava Newman, Zita Martins, Doug Hart) as well as members of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), and National Innovation Agency (ANI). The remote meeting had over 70 participations.
At this stage the 7 flagship projects are in cruising speed and Pedro Arezes, Director of MIT Portugal Program, emphasizes the “high expectations about the results”.
The Minister Manuel Heitor also highlighted the progress achieved at this point and particularly the increase of the recruitment of young researchers. “The ultimate goal of MIT Portugal is to open opportunities to everyone and in particular to young researchers. We live in challenging times and these projects are very interesting and a unique opportunity to recruit young researchers.”
For Manuel Heitor these flagships are very important in their field areas, in engaging research and business communities but also because of the moment we are living in Europe: the Launch of Horizon Europe program and Europe’s recovery and resilient plan.
Manuel Heitor emphasizes the importance of these flagships projects to improve new frontiers of knowledge and to thrive the economy. “We need to move to an economy and society driven by knowledge. Many of the ideas under the flagship projects can be important to thrive collaboration between research, academic and the innovative business sector, in order to move forward to new frontiers of knowledge and to thrive our economy”.
The minister finalized his speech by adding “we are following these projects very closely to guarantee they are effective breakthroughs in their areas of knowledge, and also build collaborative joint-ventures between academic communities and business sectors which are very important for the coming years”.
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.
MPP Director and Co-director, Dava Newman and Zita Martins, thanked everyone’s presence and shared their pleasure to see all the project’s research progress. They also made some few announcements regarding MPP activities (the ongoing Call for a MIT seed projects; the Exploratory Call in PT in the next month; and the next meeting of the Program Board Committee by end of March) and asked projects to always share news about projects outputs with MIT Portugal. The next meeting will be around June.
In the next month’s MPP will promote the Flagship projects which will be presented by the leading companies and partner institutions. March is the month of SNOB-5G. Stay tuned!
More details about the MPP projects here!