MIT Portugal and Flagships Projects joined for a follow-up meeting on project's research progress
This week, October 25, the MIT Portugal meets at FLAD with all the 7 Flagship Projects teams for one more follow-up meeting on project progress updates. This time the meeting took place in a hybrid format combining in-person with remote participation.
In face-to-face were the Portuguese PI’s of the projects and the PT MPP Directors (Pedro Arezes and Zita Martins). The MPP Directors at MIT, FCT, and all the projects’ research teams at MIT and from the several PT institutions joined the session remotely.
Joining this meeting and for the welcome notes, we had Elsa Henriques, from the FLAD Governing Board, and a video message from the Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, Manuel Heitor.
The meeting was kicked off by the MPP Director, Pedro Arezes. He started by thanking Elsa Henrique from FLAD for welcoming MIT Portugal and taking the opportunity to share some updates from MPP and some important information regarding the monitoring of the MPP projects.
In order to share more details about each project, namely project goals, collaborative work within the industry, and the involvement of PT students a new project status monitoring strategy was developed. “The strategy includes a new tool designed to gather information regarding the projects’ KPIs including Research Plan Execution, Intellectual Outputs and Granted Scholarships in the ambit of the project”, announced Pedro.The MPP Director reinforced the high relevance of these projects “for Portugal’s development in the MIT Portugal research domains”.
Minister Manuel Heitor started his message by saying that MPP “was, is and will be critical for the Portuguese position in the world and especially for a new positioning relation between Europe and the United States”.
The Minister also referred to the importance of these flagship projects and the investment in deep tech and new research frameworks from “sustainable cities, to space systems, and also digitalization in the industry” to lead and make the necessary change worldwide. “We face unique challenges in terms of greening our society and with research and new observation methods, we can really address these challenges. That’s why we introduced in these set of programs the space systems and particularly the development of new methods based on satellite information, but also to change the way we live in cities, the way we prevent forest fires, and the way we lead with coastal areas”, he added.
The minister finalized his message sharing is trust to the PT research community and MIT to bring new disruptive ideas to contribute to a better world. “Every day we need to do better. We need continually new ideas and tools and implement them through a complete innovative framework.”
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.
On site we had Hélder Silva and Manuel Coutinho from AEROS Project; José Maria Garrett and Paulo Ferrão from C-Tech; Eduardo Pereira e João Mota Faria from K2D; Cristiano Coutinho from Transformer; Duarte Folgado and Luís Silva from Operator; Mario Moutinho e Bruno Augusto from NewSat.
This time the projects also dedicated time to discuss results and strategies in order to identify synergies between the different projects.
Zita Martins, MPP Co-director thanked everyone’s presence and give a warm thank you to FLAD and express “how glad we are to continue strengthening MPP’s relationship with FLAD, as we both share the goal of promoting the development of Portugal in cooperation with the United States of America”.
For the MPP co-director, this meeting was very beneficial to see all the project’s research progress. Zita also reinforced the importance of this new projects monitoring strategy “to show how one of MPP program pillars – research – is being addressed and analyzed and how these projects are of extreme relevance for the national scientific and socioeconomic panorama and consequent impact”.
The MPP co-director invited all the participants to stay tuned for future MPP communications regarding the industry. “The program is working to create the opportunities whereby stakeholders can meet and discuss future collaborations and give visibility to the achievements of each party. An official Industry Affiliates program that comprehensively addresses the terms of the relationships between the industries and the MPP community will be announced soon.”
We would like to give a warm thank you to FLAD for hosting this meeting.
More details about the MPP projects here!