The winners of the 4th Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Award were announced this Sunday, March 8, on the International Women’s Day. The Técnico alumnae Paula Panarra and Catarina Belém were the winners of the 2019 edition. In 2016 Técnico established this award, which aims to promote gender balance policy at Técnico and to recognise the crucial role of women in all fields of Engineering.

Paula Panarra, former student of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, won the award in the Role Model category. The Técnico alumna has more than 20 years of professional experience and she is the General Manager at Microsoft Portugal since 2016.

Catarina Belém won the award in the Young Alumni category, for “her outstanding academic career, involvement in academic activities and remarkable academic progression, which culminated in her master’s dissertation titled “Optimization of Time-Consuming Objective Functions Derivative – Free Approaches and their Application in Architecture”, obtaining a remarkable score of 20/20″. Catarina Belém completed her master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering in June 2019, and she currently works as a Research Data Scientist at Feedzai.

As in previous years, the award will be delivered at a public ceremony on a date to be announced later.