Since its founding 19 years ago as a pioneering collaboration with Portuguese universities, research institutions and corporations, the MIT-Portugal Program (MPP) has achieved a slew of successes — from enabling 47 entrepreneurial spinoffs and funding over 220 joint projects between MIT and Portuguese researchers to training a generation of remarkable researchers on each side of the Atlantic.
In March, with nearly 20 years of collaboration under their belts, MIT and the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) signed an agreement that officially launches this system’s next chapter. Running through 2030, MPP’s Phase 4 will support continued exploration of progressive ideas and solutions in fields starting from artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to climate change — each on the MIT campus and with partners throughout Portugal.
“Considered one of some great benefits of having a program that has gone on so long is that we’re pretty much conversant in one another at this point. Through the years, we’ve learned one another’s systems, strengths and weaknesses and we’ve been in a position to create a synergy that may not have existed if we worked together for a brief time period,” says Douglas Hart, MIT mechanical engineering professor and MPP co-director.
Hart and John Hansman, the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and MPP co-director, are desperate to take this system’s existing research projects further, while adding recent areas of focus identified by MIT and FCT. Generally known as the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in Portugal, FCT is the national public agency supporting research in science, technology and innovation under Portugal’s Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation.
“Over the past 20 years, the partnership with MIT has built a foundation of trust that has fostered collaboration amongst researchers and the event of projects with significant scientific impact and contributions to the Portuguese economy,” Fernando Alexandre, Portugal’s minister for education, science, and innovation, says. “On this recent phase of the partnership, running from 2025 to 2030, we expect even greater ambition and impact — raising Portuguese science and its capability to remodel the economy and improve our society to even higher levels, while helping to deal with the challenges we face in areas equivalent to climate change and the oceans, digitalization, and space.”
“International collaborations just like the MIT-Portugal Program are absolutely vital to MIT’s mission of research, education and repair. I’m thrilled to see this system move into its next phase,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “MPP offers our faculty and students opportunities to work in unique research environments where they not only make recent findings and learn recent methods but in addition contribute to solving urgent local and global problems. MPP’s work within the realm of ocean science and climate is a first-rate example of how international partnerships like this will help solve vital human problems.”
Sharing MIT’s commitment to academic independence and excellence, Kornbluth adds, “the institutions and researchers we partner with through MPP enhance MIT’s ability to attain its mission, enabling us to pursue the exacting standards of mental and inventive distinction that make MIT a cradle of innovation and world leader in scientific discovery.”
The epitome of an efficient international collaboration, MPP has stayed true to its mission and continued to deliver results here within the U.S. and in Portugal for nearly 20 years — prevailing amid myriad shifts within the political, social, and economic landscape. The multifaceted program encompasses an annual research conference and academic summits equivalent to an Innovation Workshop at MIT each June and a Marine Robotics Summer School within the Azores in July, in addition to student and college exchanges that facilitate collaborative research. Through the third phase of this system alone, 59 MIT students and 53 faculty and researchers visited Portugal, and MIT hosted 131 students and 49 faculty and researchers from Portuguese universities and other institutions.
In each roughly five-year phase, MPP researchers give attention to a handful of core research areas. For Phase 3, MPP advanced cutting-edge research in 4 strategic areas: climate science and climate change; Earth systems: oceans to close space; digital transformation in manufacturing; and sustainable cities. Inside these broad areas, MIT and FCT researchers worked together on quite a few small-scale projects and several other large “flagship” ones, including development of Portugal’s CubeSat satellite, a collaboration between MPP and several other Portuguese universities and corporations that marked the country’s second satellite launch and the primary in 30 years.
While work within the Phase 3 fields will proceed during Phase 4, researchers may also turn their attention to 4 more areas: chips/nanotechnology, energy (a previous focus in Phase 2), artificial intelligence, and space.
“We’re opening up the aperture for added collaboration areas,” Hansman says.
Along with specializing in distinct subject areas, each phase has emphasized the varied parts of MPP’s mission to differing degrees. While Phase 3 accentuated collaborative research greater than educational exchanges and entrepreneurship, those two points can be given more weight under the Phase 4 agreement, Hart said.
“Now we have approval in Phase 4 to bring a variety of Portuguese students over, and our principal investigators will profit from close collaborations with Portuguese researchers,” he says.
The longevity of MPP and the recent launch of Phase 4 are evidence of this system’s value. This system has played a job in the tutorial, technological and economic progress Portugal has achieved over the past 20 years, as well.
“The Portugal of today is remarkably stronger than the Portugal of 20 years ago, and lots of the places where they’re stronger have been impacted by this system,” says Hansman, pointing to sustainable cities and “green” energy, specifically. “We are able to’t take direct credit, but we’ve been a part of Portugal’s journey forward.”
Since MPP began, Hart adds, “Portugal has develop into way more entrepreneurial. Many, many, many more start-up firms are coming out of Portuguese universities than there was.”
A recent evaluation of MPP and FCT’s other U.S. collaborations highlighted a variety of positive outcomes. The report noted that collaborations with MIT and other US universities have enhanced Portuguese research capacities and promoted organizational upgrades within the national R&D ecosystem, while providing Portuguese universities and corporations with opportunities to interact in complex projects that may have been difficult to undertake on their very own.
Regarding MIT specifically, the report found that MPP’s long-term collaboration has spawned the establishment of sustained doctoral programs and pointed to a marked shift inside Portugal’s educational ecosystem toward globally aligned standards. MPP, it reported, has facilitated the education of 198 Portuguese PhDs.
Portugal’s universities, students and corporations aren’t alone in benefitting from the research, networks, and economic activity MPP has spawned. MPP also delivers unique value to MIT, in addition to to the broader US science and research community. Among the many program’s consistent themes over time, for instance, is “joint interest within the Atlantic,” Hansman says.
This summer, Faial Island within the Azores will host MPP’s fifth annual Marine Robotics Summer School, a two-week course open to 12 Portuguese Master’s and first yr PhD students and 12 MIT upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. The course, which incorporates lectures by MIT and Portuguese faculty and other researchers, workshops, labs and hands-on experiences, “is at all times my favorite,” said Hart.
“I get to work with a few of the perfect researchers on this planet there, and a number of the top students coming out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, and Portugal,” he says, adding that a few of his previous Marine Robotics Summer School students have come to check at MIT after which gone on to develop into professors in ocean science.
“So, it’s been exciting to see the expansion of scholars coming out of that program, definitely a positive impact,” Hart says.
MPP provides one-of-a-kind opportunities for ocean research resulting from the unique marine facilities available in Portugal, including not only open ocean off the Azores but in addition Lisbon’s deep-water port and a Portuguese Naval facility just south of Lisbon that is obtainable for collaborative research by international scientists. Like MIT, Portuguese universities are also strongly invested in climate change research — a field of study keenly related to ocean systems.
“The international collaboration has allowed us to check and further develop our research prototypes in several aquaculture environments each within the US and in Portugal, while constructing on the unique expertise of our Portuguese faculty collaborator Dr. Ricardo Calado from the University of Aveiro and our industry collaborators,” says Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Profession Development Associate Professor in MIT’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the Human-Computer Interaction Group on the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Mueller points to the work of MIT mechanical engineering PhD student Charlene Xia, a Marine Robotics Summer School participant, whose research is geared toward developing a cheap system to watch the microbiome of seaweed farms and halt the spread of harmful bacteria related to ocean warming. Along with participating in the summertime school as a student, Xia returned to the Azores for 2 subsequent years as a teaching assistant.
“The MIT-Portugal Program has been a key enabler of our research on monitoring the aquatic microbiome for potential disease outbreaks,” Mueller says.
As MPP enters its next phase, Hart and Hansman are optimistic concerning the program’s continuing success on each side of the Atlantic and envision broadening its impact going forward.
“I believe, at this point, the research goes very well, and we’ve got lots of connections. I believe considered one of our goals is to expand not the science of this system necessarily, however the groups involved,” Hart says, noting that MPP could have an even bigger presence in technical fields equivalent to AI and micro-nano manufacturing, in addition to in social sciences and humanities.
“We’d wish to involve many more people and recent people here at MIT, in addition to in Portugal,” he says, “in order that we are able to reach a bigger slice of the population.”
