Armando Pombeiro, a retired full professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, was elected Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences on 29 November 2024. He is the first Técnico professor to be included in the list. According to the former professor and alumnus, ‘the distinction goes beyond the personal dimension of the person elected, extending to his research group and his School’.
The official admission of the new members, elected in 2024, will take place on 1 January 2025. The diploma will be awarded at a ceremony during the Magna Meeting of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, between 6 and 8 May 2025, in Rio de Janeiro. Armando Pombeiro will be the first Técnico professor to become a member of this Academy.
Being part of institutions dedicated to ‘promoting science and culture through various actions similar to those carried out at academies of science in the Western world’ could allow Armando Pombeiro to ‘contribute to effective collaboration’ between the Brazilian and Lisbon Academies of Science, he says. ‘It will also help to foster interactions with the European academies of science to which I am affiliated and may stimulate connections between my school and Brazil’, he adds.
According to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, corresponding members are ‘scientists of recognised scientific merit […] who have made relevant contributions to the development of science in Brazil’. The proposal for a new member must be made by a minimum of ten full members.
The Brazilian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1916, in Rio de Janeiro and provides independent scientific advice to political agents on multidisciplinary issues of societal interest that require scientific information, among other things.
Armando Pombeiro has been a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences since January 2019. In June of the same year, he became the first Portuguese recipient of the ‘Prix Franco-Portugais’ from the French Academy of Chemistry and in September he was appointed honorary professor at the University of St Petersburg. In 2022, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea.
