Season's Greetings from the MIT Portugal Program

This year marked the end of the celebrations of the 15 years of the MIT Portugal Program (MPP). Throughout the years, MPP has strengthened Portugal’s critical mass and international competitiveness through strategic investments in research, education, innovative ideas, and entrepreneurial training and activities.

As the year comes to an end, we want to take this opportunity to extend to you our seasonal greetings and share some of the proudest moments we achieved together in 2022:

• We continued to support the development of disruptive research through our calls for projects. 11 new and 8 renewed seed grants, at MIT have been funded and a new exploratory call for Portuguese researchers was opened and is currently under evaluation.
  
  
• In addition to these smaller-sized innovative research projects, we regularly meet with our 7 large-scale flagship collaborative research projects to discuss their achievements, find synergies, and explore future collaborations. These projects represent a financial commitment of more than 15M€ across the strategic areas of the Program and are instrumental in connecting the Portuguese research community, industry partners, and MIT.
  
  
• 37 additional PhD candidates joined the #MITPortugalCommunity supported by MPP-FCT grants. They are joining the 73 PhD candidates that were funded already under MPP2030.
  

• The MPP facilitated joint educational initiatives as these are extremely valuable opportunities aimed at broadening MIT and Portuguese students’ learning experiences. In 2022, 3 Portuguese students were sponsored by MIT Portugal to attend the MIT Space Week at MIT and we also organized the second edition of the Marine Robotics Summer School in Faial, Azores, for 20 grad students in engineering and science fields, from 6 nationalities.
  
  
• We brought together the MPP community at our Annual Conference and disseminated our activity: we had over 100 participants, 25 speakers; 82 research posters presented and 5 best poster awardees.

The widespread support, commitment, and engagement of so many researchers and students on both sides have been instrumental to the success of MPP.

The future starts today, with the actions that we take. We look forward to continuing working together in 2023 in our joint commitment to paving the way for novel scientific research that addresses the challenges that our society is facing.

Happy holidays to all! Let the light shine bright this holiday season.