Science and Technology

New Faculty Members

As in previous years, Técnico renews and strengthens its faculty members.

Seventeen new faculty members, from different areas of engineering and science, will join Instituto Superior Técnico this academic year. Renewing faculty members has been a strategic goal of Técnico, pursuing excellence and innovation.

Professor Arlindo Oliveira, president of Técnico, welcomed the new faculty members, noting that “these new admissions will contribute decisively to keep and develop a tradition of excellence that has characterized Técnico since its creation, in 1911”.

According to professor Arlindo Oliveira “The main strategic objective of Técnico Lisboa is to attract and retain the best faculty, in all areas of knowledge. To reach that objective, we have defined specific targets and a set of mechanisms for hiring, promoting, and renewing its faculty. These mechanisms have made it possible to attract high quality young professors and researchers, over the last few years. In 2016, we admitted 69 new professors and 15 researchers, selected in highly competitive international recruitment competitions”.

Get to know Técnico’s new faculty members:

Ana C. Marques joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the Chemical Engineering Department, at IST, in February 2017 and belongs to the research unit CERENA. She graduated and holds a Ph.D. in Materials Sci. & Eng. (IST, 2005). She held a post-doctoral position at Lehigh University (USA), before joining the chemical company Dow Corning in Belgium, where she worked as an R&D Chemist from 2007 to 2011. At Dow Corning, she was the leader of R&D projects, aiming at new chemical products development (e.g. halogen-free flame retardant additives) and large-scale production.

This was followed by R&D Coordination roles at Ynvisible S.A. and Greenseal Research Ltd., for the development of electrochromic displays and greener components for polyurethane foams, respectively. 8 international patents, numerous papers and commercialized products have resulted from her collaboration with the industry. Recently, while holding a FCT Post-Doc grant, she has started a Microencapsulation and Immobilization Technology Platform, her main current research interest, aimed at customized solutions for enabling active materials and advanced products.

António Ramos Andrade joined as an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department and the research center IDMEC. He graduated in Civil Engineering at IST in 2008 and completed his PhD in Transportation Systems at MIT Portugal Program in 2014. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the research strategic partnership between Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) and the University of Huddersfield, working in several research projects for the railway industry. He was also an invited assistant professor in the Business School at ISCTE-IUL in Statistics and Quantitative Methods.

His research interests cover a broad range of railway engineering problems, including the degradation of railway track geometry, the wear and damage of wheelsets and the prediction and optimization of maintenance decisions.

Filipa Fernandes Mendes is Assistant Researcher at the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering (DECN) since January 2016 and member of the Centre for Nuclear Sciences and Technologies (C2TN) since 2013. She completed a PhD in Cellular Biology at the Faculty of Sciences of ULisboa in December 2004 with a thesis focusing on the disease Cystic Fibrosis. The experimental work was performed as a visiting graduate student at the University of Virginia, USA. During the post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Health in Lisboa she received 2 awards: the Gulbenkian Award “Estímulo à Investigação” and the L’Oréal Medal of Honour for Women in Science. She joined the Radiopharmaceutical Sciences Group of Instituto Tecnológico e Nuclear (in IST since 2012) as an Assistant Researcher, and from 2013 to 2015 she held a FCT Investigator Development Grant.

Her multidisciplinary scientific activity is focused in molecular imaging and therapy, and in particular in the pre-clinical evaluation of non-invasive cancer probes. Recently, she began to explore a molecular imaging approach to Cystic Fibrosis for the evaluation of the therapeutic effect of novel drugs.

Filipa Moleiro joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department of IST in the Scientific Area of Applied Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering in December 2016. She earned at IST her BS in 2003 and her PhD in 2009 both in Aerospace Engineering. She received a Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Grant by FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology and studied at Texas A&M University co-advised by Dr. JN Reddy, specializing on the modelling of composite adaptive structures. Since 2009 she is an integrated member of LAETA – Associated Laboratory of Energy, Transports and Aeronautics, focusing her research on the optimization of piezo-viscoelastic composite structures and their aeronautical applications, aiming for aeroelastic control, attenuation of vibrations and noise.

As a former student of IST she was honored with the Merit Diploma in 2001/02 and at the Ninth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology in 2008 was awarded with the Young Researcher Best Paper Prize.

Inês Marques is Assistant Professor at the Department of Engineering and Management (DEG) since January 2017, and joined as a Researcher the Centre for Management Studies (CEG-IST). Her main research areas are operations research and operations management, focusing in planning and scheduling and in the management of health care services, where she has mainly developed decision support tools for improved operating room management.

She has published in international journals in the areas of health care management and management science. She is member of the board of the European Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) and of the European Working Group on OR in Practice. She holds a degree in Mathematics Applied to Economics and Management (Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão), a MSc in Operations Research, and a PhD in Statistics and Operations Research (Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa).

Joana Mendonça joined the Department of Engineering and Management as assistant professor in January 2017. She does research at IN+, Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technological Change. In 2012 she integrated the IRGC international network and developed research on technology adoption and industrial development, with particular emphasis on aeronautics.

In 2008 she was an invited research at ZEW (Centre for European Economic Research), maintaining collaboration since. She is a Scientific Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Partnership since 2014. Previously to this appointment she was assistant to the Minister for Economy on Innovation. She obtained her PhD in Engineering and Industrial Management at IST, University of Lisbon, in 2009. In 2009-2010 she was an assistant to the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education. Between 2010 and 2012 she was a Deputy Director at Directorate for Education and Science statistics (DGEEC). Parallel to her research, she has followed technology commercialization projects.

Maria Isabel Dias is Principal Researcher (w/habilitation) of the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering (DECN), and member of the Centre for Nuclear Sciences and Technologies (C2TN), being the research group coordinator since 2015, in the Campus Tecnológico e Nuclear (CTN), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). She is since 2015 member of the Conselho de Escola of IST, since 2014 member of Board for Loures Campus Management, CTN, IST, and since 2005 responsible for the Luminescence Dating Laboratory. She specializes (MSc and PhD) in Mineralogy, Geochemistry and Technological properties of Clays at the FCUL, and the Habilitation on Georesources in 2015, at the DeCivil, IST.

She developed and implemented those expertise in other fields, such as environment and cultural heritage, at former Instituto Tecnológico e Nuclear (ITN) in 1998, first with a post-doctoral FCT grant and after as auxiliary researcher. Here she developed skills in the application of nuclear methods of analysis in geosciences, environment, NORM, archaeology, art history, etc. Currently participates in the following lines of activities: Environmental radioactivity; Geoprocesses, strategic geological resources and climate change; Environment – anthropogenic impact, treatment and recycling; Cultural Heritage – materials and contexts. She belongs to several national and international professional associations, having been President of the Iberian Society of Archeometry Applied to the Cultural Heritage in the mandate 2011-2015, and is now the vice.

Miguel Matos is an Assistant Professor at Departamento de Engenharia Informática and Senior Researcher at INESC-ID, in the Distributed Systems Group. He earned is Ph.D. in 2013 at MAPi, a joint degree of U. Minho, U. Aveiro and U. Porto were he addressed the problems of data dissemination on very-large scale distributed systems. From 2013 to 2016, he was a researcher at INESC-TEC and U. Minho, were he published several papers on top conferences and participated in the writing of winning European and private project calls and their respective execution.

His research interests lie in the area of distributed systems, in particular on the subjects of scalability, fault-tolerance, consistency, very large scale transactional databases, security and the automation and decentralized management of very large scale computing infrastructures.
Remarkably, these problems lie at the core of several topics with societal impact in particular Cloud Computing, IoT and the Blockchain.

Miguel Torres Preto is Associate Professor at Department of Engineering and Management of Técnico Lisbon, and he is research fellow at IN+, Laboratory of Technology Policy and Management. Between 2013 and 2016, he worked, as an Assistant Professor, in the Faculty of Economics at University of Coimbra (FEUC).
M. T. Preto has a doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering and Management (2009), master degree in Engineering and Management of Technology (2004), and a bachelor degree in Environmental Engineering (2001), Técnico Lisbon.
His research interests focus on the economic impact of entrepreneurship, technological change and knowledge on the individual, the company and the region. Among other scientific publications, he published several book chapters and articles in international scientific journals, in particular, Journal of International Business Studies (FT45), Small Business Economics and European Economic Review.

The work of M. T. Preto was selected for Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management (2008, 2012) Haynes Prize for Most Promising Scholar of the Academy of International Business (2013) and won the Best Paper Award at the Interdisciplinary European Conference on Entrepreneurial Research (2015).

Mikolas Janota is joining the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as an assistant professor. He is integrated in the INESC-ID’s group SW Algorithms and Tools for Constraint Solving. Previously he was at FCUL as a visiting assistant professor and MSR Cambridge, UK, as a post-doc. He read his PhD at University College Dublin and his interests mainly focus on algorithms for solving problems in mathematical logic—in particular reasoning with quantification.

His solver for quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) has won several awards in the recent competitions.

Nuno Nunes (b. 1970) holds an habilitation from the Faculty of Engineering U. Porto, a Ph.D in Informatics Engineering from U. Madeira (under supervision from FEUP) and a Licenciatura (five year degree) in informatics engineering from IST. He is currently Full Professor at the Department of Engineering Informatics at IST, Member of the Board of the Madeira Regional Agency RTD+I and adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was Director of CMU Portugal and Associate Professor at the U. Madeira where he was Vice-Rector and Head of the Faculty of Exact and Engineering Sciences.

Nuno leads Madeira-ITI an autonomous research unit integrated in the Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSYS) with ISR, IN+ and MARETEC. His research grant track record exceeds 12M€. Nuno’s research interests fall in the domain of human-computer interaction applying models to software, system and service design for the domains of sustainability, biodiversity, design and participatory culture.

Pedro Assis will join the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico as an assistant professor in January 2016. He will work at LIP, a laboratory dedicated to Experimental High Energy Physics and Associated Instrumentation. P. Assis earned his PhD in Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico in 2009. Pedro was awarded an advanced fellowship from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation to work at LIP as a post-doc.

His research interest are in the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Physics, its detectors, instrumentation and electronics. Pedro Assis is head of the LIP electronics laboratory at Lisbon and coordinates the Portuguese group that participates in the world’s largest Cosmic Ray detector – the Pierre Auger Observatory.

Pedro Freitas will join the Department of Mathematics as full professor in May 2017. He received a PhD in Mathematics from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh), followed by a Human Capital and Mobility Fellowship at the Department of Pure Mathematics at TU Delft. Before re-joining IST, he was a full professor at the Faculty of Human Kinetics, University of Lisbon. He has held several invited positions, including at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris), the Erwin Schrödinger Institute (Vienna) and the Doppler Institute (Prague).

He received the Distinção por Mérito and the Scientific Prize UTL/Santander Totta in Mathematics both from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. He was President of the National Mathematics Committee and is a member of the Applied Mathematics Committee of the EMS. His scientific interests range from Spectral Geometry to Industrial Mathematics; he has been one of the main people behind the Portuguese edition of the European Study Groups with Industry.

Rui Maranhão Abreu is with IST of University of Lisbon as an Associate Professor in Software Engineering. Rui received his MSc in Informatics and Systems Engineering from University of Minho, PT (2004) and his PhD in Computer Science/Software Engineering from Delft University of Technology, NL. Before joining IST, Rui was a Member of Research Staff at PARC, USA (Jul’14–Dec’16), Assistant Professor at FEUP, PT (Sep’09-Feb’17), Visiting Faculty Member at CMU, USA (Sep’10-Jan’11), Research Assistant at ESI by TNO, NL (Aug’05-Sep’09). With over 140 papers and 3 patents, Rui conducts research in software engineering and artificial intelligence and provides top education in software engineering.

Transferring technology to market is also amongst his concerns due to his entrepreneurial spirits. His work has given him several awards, both in academic and technology transfer events. Key interests: improve software quality; human-driven (quantified self) software development technologies.

Shan Wang joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty in December 2016 as an assistant Professor in the field of naval architecture and marine engineering. Before that time she was an invited assistant professor in Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC). She received her BS from Tianjin University in China, her MS and PhD from Instituto Superior Técnico, all in naval architecture and marine engineering. Shan was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology through a doctoral fellowship and awarded by Chinese government for outstanding PhD students abroad.

Her research interests cover the prediction of slamming loads, hydro-elastic response of ship structures, ship structure vibrations, and mooring system analysis. She has taught the course on ship vibrations for three years and started to give another course on the mooring system of ocean floating structure.

Sérgio Luís Proença Duarte Guerreiro joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as an Assistant Professor, Information Systems scientific area, in January 2017; and he will join INESC-ID, IDSS (Information and Decision Support Systems Lab) as a researcher.
Previously, he was a Senior IT Project Manager in Sonae.com and an Assistant Professor at ULHT and at UBI. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Information Systems and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico / University of Lisbon (IST/UL). Before that, he concluded the Ms.C. degree and the engineering degree. Both degrees also in Information Systems and Computer Engineering at IST/UL.

His research interest is located in Enterprise Engineering with the goal of finding solutions to control the business transactions operation, identifying and solving run-time misalignments. Uses the specification languages of BPMN, Archimate, DEMO, UML, SysML, WOSL, EPC; the mechanisms of Process Mining, Business Analytics; implementing solutions for Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Tiago G. Fernandes will join the Department of Bioengineering faculty as an assistant professor in December 2016. He is also a member of the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences, Lisbon, Portugal, a national center of excellence in the field. He has completed a PhD degree in Biotechnology at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in 2009. During his doctoral studies he has also conducted research for two years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. His work has been developed mostly in the interdisciplinary area of stem cell bioengineering, and his research interests are focused on the development of artificial cellular niches for studying the mechanisms that affect human stem cell pluripotency and differentiation.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Malcolm Lilly Award at the 7th European Symposium on Biochemical Engineering Science (2008), and more recently of the Young Investigator Award at the 20th annual Regenerative Medicine Workshop at Hilton Head, USA (2016).