Mission and History

Alves Marques graduated in Electrical Engineering from Técnico in 1953 and was awarded the Bandeira de Melo prize.

Whilst still a student, he began teaching at Técnico, where he was in charge of the chair of General Physics for two years. With a scholarship from the Institute of High Culture since 1956, he studied the structure of matter, carrying out experimental work at the Técnico Physics Laboratory.

He was the first researcher to do a PhD at the Instituto Superior Técnico in 1962, supervised by Prof António da Silveira, a leading figure in the teaching of physics and the driving force behind the creation of teaching laboratories at Técnico.

José Mariano Gago was born in Lisbon and was one of the most renowned Portuguese scientists and politicians.

He attended Liceu Camões before enrolling at Instituto Superior Técnico, where he graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1971. He was a fellow of the Instituto de Alta Cultura at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and High Energies of École Polytechnique from 1971 to 1976. He obtained the degree of Docteur d'État ès Sciences in the field of Physics from Université Paris VI Pierre et Marie Curie in 1976. He was a fellow of the European Organization for Nuclear Research from 1976 to 1978.

During the academic year 1969-1970, he was president of the Student Association of Instituto Superior Técnico. Even before completing his degree, he was a monitor at Instituto Superior Técnico. In 1979, he was hired as a full professor at the Department of Physics of Instituto Superior Técnico. José Mariano Gago developed his professional activity as a researcher in the field of experimental particle physics in Paris, at the École Polytechnique, in Geneva, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and in Lisbon, at the Laboratory of Experimental Particle Physics (LIP), which he created and of which he was President.

In May 1986, he was appointed president of the National Board for Scientific and Technological Research, a position he held until May 1989. In 1987, he promoted the National Conference on Scientific and Technological Research, following which he launched the Science and Technology Mobilization Program, which aimed to implement a set of projects to promote S&T at the national level.

In 1995, Mariano Gago was appointed Minister of Science and Technology of the XIII Constitutional Government, a position he held until 2002, already in the XIV Constitutional Government. In this capacity, he promoted initiatives to promote scientific and technological culture in Portugal (Ciência Viva) and in the European Union. He also coordinated and promoted the Strategy for the Information Society, which included initiatives such as connecting all schools to the Internet, creating Internet Spaces, the Digital Cities and Regions Program, and the Science, Technology, and Society Network (RCTS).

In 2005, he was appointed Minister of Science, Technology, and Higher Education of the XVII Constitutional Government of José Sócrates, a position for which he was reappointed to the XVIII Constitutional Government. As Minister of Science, Technology, and Higher Education, he was responsible for a comprehensive reform of the higher education system in Portugal.

Carlos Matos Ferreira was born in Lisbon in 1948, graduated in Electrical Engineering from IST (1971), obtained his PhD in Physics from the University of Paris XI - Orsay (1976), with the distinction of Très Honorable, and earned the title of Aggregated in Physics at IST (1979). He passed away unexpectedly in 2014 in Lisbon.

He was a Full Professor in the Department of Physics (DF) at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) since 1979. He served as President of IST between 2001-2009 and as President of the DF of IST in the biennia 1984-1986 and 1992-1994, having held many other academic, scientific, and administrative positions, in Portugal and abroad. He was the founder of the Gas Discharges and Gas Electronics group at the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN) of IST, and Director of the APPLAuSE Doctoral Program (Advanced Programme in Plasma Science and Engineering) of IPFN/IST. He was a member of the European Academy (elected in 2002) and a Grand Officer of the Order of Infante D. Henrique, a decoration granted to him by the President of the Portuguese Republic in 2005. He was awarded by FCT in 2004 with the Stimulus to Excellence in Research prize.

His scientific work was in the field of low-temperature plasmas, mainly in Gas Discharges and Electronics, Kinetic Theory, and Atomic and Molecular Physics in plasmas. He dedicated many years of his research career to the study of the electronic Boltzmann equation and the theoretical formulation describing the structure of plasmas sustained by surface waves.

He was an internationally renowned plasma physicist. He authored two books and published over 400 articles in international journals, several book chapters in international publishers, and a very high number of contributions in peer-reviewed international conferences. He supervised over 20 research programs for undergraduate and postgraduate students (post-doctoral, doctoral, and master's), both national and international. For many years, he was responsible for the 2nd cycle UC "Physics and Plasma Technology" of the Master's degree in Technological Engineering Physics.

Jorge Dias de Deus hails from Vila Fernando, Elvas municipality. He was a student at the Técnico, studying Chemical Engineering. While still a student, he also took on the challenge of being the president of the Students' Association of Instituto Superior Técnico (AEIST) during the dictatorship, in the biennium of 1963/64. He would later head to Imperial College London for his PhD and then move on to Copenhagen, specializing in Particle Physics. In 1973, he developed the idea of geometric scaling in Copenhagen, which provided new insights into the scaling laws of partons, namely quarks and gluons, the main constituents of protons and neutrons.

He returned a few years later to do first-rate work on various fronts, being a brilliant and exemplary academic in all aspects: scientific, pedagogical, cultural, ethical, and humane. Dias de Deus served as the president of the Department of Physics, where he served two terms (1987-1989 and 1995-1998), but his contributions went far beyond these leadership roles. The name of Professor Jorge Dias de Deus is inseparable from an innovative vision of Physics education at Técnico. He was instrumental in the genesis of three courses that attract the best students in the country: Technological Physics Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering. He was President of Técnico between 1991 and 1992.

Jorge Dias de Deus was trained in Particle Physics, but his vision was multidisciplinary, understanding the connection of particle physics to astrophysics. In 1994, he founded the Multidisciplinary Center for Astrophysics, now the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (CENTRA), which he chaired for several years. In addition to his brilliant scientific career, Jorge Dias de Deus devoted part of his life to popularizing Physics through lectures, popular science books, and introductions to Physics for which he is known among a wide audience.

Alfredo Barbosa Henriques graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of Porto and obtained his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Glasgow with the thesis 'Relativistic Equations for Meson Structure'. He was a fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He taught at the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, until his retirement in 2013, having been a Full Professor since 1992. He was a founding member of CENTRA/IST, a multidisciplinary research center established in 1994. He was also actively involved in the creation of the undergraduate program in Technological Physics Engineering at IST. He served as the president of the Department of Physics twice.

His scientific activity can be divided into two distinct periods, the first from 1976 to 1986, and the other from 1986 onwards. The first period was especially dedicated to exploring relativistic models of quarks for mesons and baryons.

From 1986 onwards, he became interested in the applications of high-energy physics to cosmology, astrophysics, including the investigation of gravitational waves of cosmological origin and the calculation of their spectrum. Particular attention was directed towards the high-frequency region (MHz and GHz), as from these frequencies, we can obtain important information about the very early universe. He also focused on problems related to quantum gravity and its applications to cosmology. He published several dozen articles on all these topics in international journals. He is the author of four books published by IST Press, three of them co-authored.

Gustavo Castelo-Branco is a Retired Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), with a collaboration contract. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics in 1976 from the City College in New York. In the early eighties, he joined the faculty of IST and became a Full Professor in the late eighties.

During his career at IST, he attracted a large number of talented young individuals to the field, as part of their master's or doctoral work. He supervised over ten doctoral students, the vast majority of whom pursued successful international careers, especially in academia. His supervisory and managerial activities decisively contributed to the creation and establishment of a Particle Physics community in the country, and an extremely active research center, the CFTP, internationally recognized as one of the best research centers in Higgs and CP violation physics.

His strategic contributions were also important for the creation of the undergraduate program in Technological Physics Engineering at IST. His activities were recognized at the highest level, both nationally and internationally, with the award of the title of Commander of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword by the President of the Portuguese Republic in 2005, and the award of the von Humboldt Research Prize in 2004. From 2005 to 2015, he was a Board Member of the High Energy Physics Division of the European Physical Society.

His book on CP violation, co-authored with L. Lavoura and J. P. Silva in 1999, received the Gulbenkian Science Award in 2001. One of his articles on Higgs physics, with 5 co-authors, has garnered thousands of citations, an extremely rare feat in theoretical physics, which attests to the exceptional level of his scientific work.

Jorge Romão was born in Alcanena in 1950 and graduated in Electrical Engineering from IST in 1974. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to join the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago (UC). His mentor was James Cronin (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980), and his advisor was Peter Freund. He won the "V. Telegdi Prize" at UC in 1975 for the best Candidacy Exam. He obtained his Ph.D. from UC in 1979. Aggregated by FCUL in 1987, he has been a professor at the Department of Physics (DF) of IST since 1989 (full professor since 1994).

Jorge Romão's scientific activity extends to various areas, including topics in Quantum Gravity, Supersymmetry, Higgs and Multi-Higgs Physics, Neutrino Physics, Flavor Physics, and Renormalization. He established a renowned school in Quantum Field Theory (QFT) at DF. Together with his students (10 Ph.D. and 14 MSc), he created dedicated software for QFT. He is the author of two textbooks, published by IST Press (2011) and Wiley-VCH (2015). These publications reflect part of a vast contribution to education across all three study cycles over 40 years, with special emphasis on QFT.

In his management activities, he served on School and Scientific Councils, was President of the DF and Research Centers, a member of the IST Course Restructuring Commission. He was the Coordinator of the Undergraduate Program in Technological Physics Engineering, the Ph.D. Programs in Physics and Technological Physics Engineering, and also chaired the doctoral scholarship panel of FCT and the IDPASC Doctoral Program. He co-authored a recent Strategic Plan for DF, as well as the Department Presentation Report for the analysis of DF activity in 2017. He has been involved in managing Portugal-CERN funding, presiding over international juries for many years.

Carlos Varandas was born in Pinheiro de Coja in 1951. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering (1974), a Ph.D. in Physics (1984), and an aggregation in Technological Physics Engineering (1996) from IST/UTL. He was a lecturer at the Department of Physics (DF) from 1973 to 2013 and a researcher at CEL, CFN, and IPFN.

In teaching, he initially took responsibility for the Electromagnetism discipline and the restructuring of Teaching Laboratories. He served as Coordinator of Technological Physics Engineering and the Master's in Physics, and taught courses on Plasma Physics, Nuclear Energy, Diagnostic Techniques, Digital Instrumentation, and Science and Technology Management. He participated in the accreditation of Technological Physics Engineering by the Order of Engineers.

His R&D activities focused on Cold and Magnetic Confinement Fusion Plasma Physics and Engineering. He was responsible for several projects, such as the Association Contract with Euratom, the ISTTOK Tokamak, and the FCT Associated Laboratory Contract. He supervised 11 Master's programs and 7 Ph.D. programs and co-authored 135 scientific articles. He served on the Board of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion and was an Editor of Fusion Engineering and Design. He chaired twelve international conferences.

At IST, he held various leadership positions including President of the Governing Board, Pedagogical Council, DF, CFN, IPFN, and CCUL, Deputy President for Administrative Affairs, and Vice-President for the Loures Campus of the Management Council. He was a member of the Governing Board, Management Council, Assembly of Representatives, Senate, and Coordinating Committee of the Scientific Council. He also participated in the Assemblies and Senates of UTL and UL. In the Euratom Fusion Program, he chaired the FPSC-I, Steering Committee of the European Fusion Development Agreement, Board of Directors of Fusion for Energy, and Scientific and Technical Committee of the Euratom Treaty (STC), and was a member of the JET Council, CCEFU, and Euratom Delegations to ITER and the Broader Approach for Fusion Energy. After 2013, he was CEO of an SME, President of the Parish Assembly of Pinheiro de Coja. He currently serves on the Municipal Assembly of Tábua and chairs the STC.

He is a Grand Officer of the Order of Infante Dom Henrique and has received Medals of Merit for Science from the MCTES and the Municipality of Tábua.

José Tito Mendonça was born in Grândola in 1945 and received his degree in Electrical Engineering from IST in 1970. After a brief stint in industry at Sonefe in Lisbon, he went to study in Paris on a scholarship from the French Government. He obtained the Docteur de Spécialité (3rd Cycle) degree from the University of Paris-Orsay in 1973, and the Docteur ès-Sciences (doctoral d’Etat) from the same University in 1976.

He introduced nuclear fusion research in Portugal, creating the Nuclear Fusion Center, which later gave rise to the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN). He was also responsible for establishing the Association of Portugal with EURATOM, serving as its first director. He pioneered the study of ultra-intense lasers in Portugal, leading to the creation of the L2I laboratory and the Lasers and Plasmas Group (GoLP). In more recent years, he founded the MOT-Lab, the first Portuguese laboratory for laser atomic cooling. He is currently the scientific director of the Quantum Plasma Laboratory at GoLP.

He taught at IST starting in 1976 (as a full professor since 1980) and retired in 2012. He worked for extended periods at numerous international institutions, such as the Centre d’Etudes Nucleaires de Fontenay-aux-Roses (CEA) and École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, as well as the Joint Undertaking Torus (JET) in Abingdon and the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, United Kingdom. He served as a scientific advisor to the director of JET and was a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.

His scientific activity has resulted in the publication of four books and over four hundred articles in international journals. He has made pioneering contributions in photon acceleration, optical cascades, quasi-particle turbulence, stochastic acceleration, neutrino-plasma interaction, twisted waves, and photon bubbles. He has also introduced new concepts such as temporal refraction and temporal Fresnel laws, or the orbital angular momentum of plasmons, neutrino-magnetohydrodynamics, and vacuum quantum superradiance. His current interests include ultra-cold matter, light superfluids, laser accelerators, axion-plasma coupling, and quantum technologies.

Pedro Brogueira, PhD in Technological Physics Engineering, is a Full Professor at the Department of Physics of Técnico, in the area of Condensed Matter Physics and Nanotechnologies.

His main research interests focus on Atomic Force Microscopy, semiconductor materials and devices, biomaterials, energy, and Particle Physics detectors. He is a co-author of over 180 articles in international scientific journals with around 6000 citations, 2 teaching books, 20 scientific videos broadcast nationally on RTP (one minute each), 3 science exhibitions, and a scientific itinerant action for the Ministry of Education and Science.

He has been involved in about 30 competitive scientific funding projects. He is also a co-author of the key competencies framework in the area of Society, Technology, and Science at the secondary level, and of science and technology videos produced by the Mundo na Escola program for secondary education and by ANEFA for adult education. He was responsible for the Physics area within the IST Cooperation nucleus.

He was responsible for and/or a trainer in various cooperation missions in Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique, and East Timor. He was the Coordinator of the Master's programs in Technological Physics Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, President of the Department of Physics of IST, President of the Center for Physics and Advanced Materials Engineering (CeFEMA), and Coordinator of the commission to rethink engineering education and the teaching and pedagogical practices model (CAMEPP) at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST).

Currently, he is the Coordinator of the Scientific Area of Condensed Matter and Nanotechnology at the Department of Physics, a member of the Scientific Council of IST, Coordinator of the proposal for the new General Engineering Bachelor's Degree (GENI), and a member of the Management Committee of the IST CTN Campus.

Luís L. Alves was born in Lisbon in 1964. He graduated in Technological Physics Engineering from IST in 1984 and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (UTL) in 1993. He benefited from a post-doctoral scholarship at the Laboratoire de Physique des Gaz et des Plasmas (France) in 1997 and obtained the title of "Agregado" in Physical Engineering from UTL in 2006.

Since 2014, he has been a Full Professor at the Department of Physics (DF), which he chaired in the biennium 2017-2018, serving as the coordinator of the Scientific Area of Plasma Physics, Lasers, and Nuclear Fusion of the same department since 2019. He is the head of the Reactive Plasma Group: Modeling and Engineering (N-PRiME) at the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, where he is a member of the Board of Directors. He was Vice-coordinator of the Bachelor's Degree in Technological Physics Engineering, Coordinator of the Doctoral Programs in Physics and Technological Physics Engineering, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Advanced Program in Plasma Science and Engineering (APPLAuSE 2020), which he chaired between 2015-2017. He has been a member of the Scientific Council of IST since 2021.

Luís L. Alves' scientific activity focuses on the modeling and simulation of low-temperature plasmas. His work revolves around the study of DC, microwave, and radiofrequency plasmas, and the development of kinetic plasma models for materials processing, as well as biological and environmental applications.

He is the Principal Investigator responsible for the development of the simulation tool LisbOn KInetics (LoKI) and the management of its kinetic data. He has supervised over 25 graduate and postgraduate students. He is the author of more than 250 technical publications, including 100 articles in international journals. He has served as a guest editor for 7 special issues and an associate editor for Plasma Sources Science and Technology. He has delivered over 35 invited lectures at national and international conferences and holds 7 registered patents (4 granted).

Teresa Peña is a Full Professor, in a "Joint Appointment" regime, at the Department of Physics and the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Sciences of the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). She obtained her Ph.D. in 1988 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Hannover. She was a Visiting Professor at Ohio University, where she was honored with "The Robert and Rene' Glidden Visiting Professorship," awarded to distinguished individuals who have attained wide recognition based on artistic, engineering, historical, literary, or scientific achievement. She earned her Aggregation degree at IST in 1996.

She has worked on various problems in nuclear and hadronic physics, such as three-nucleon interactions, relativistic effects in nuclear structure, spectroscopy, and the structure of mesons and baryons, leading the NPSTRONG group at LIP. She has coordinated 6 multi-year scientific projects with competitive funding and has been the national leader of 5 Work Packages of European Networks. She is the author of 4 books, including the international publication "Nucleus: A trip to the heart of matter," edited by Johns Hopkins University Press, translated into Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, French, Swedish, and Korean.

In her national and international involvement in the field of Physics, she served as President of the Portuguese Society of Physics (SPF) and Chief Editor of the SPF publication "Gazeta de Física," a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of "Europhysics News" of the European Physical Society (EPS), and an elected member of the EPS Executive Committee for two terms, where she is part of the Working Group "Physics for Development."

In innovation and university management, she created, designed, or restructured courses in the area of Nuclear Physics and Applications, advocated for the Master's and Ph.D. programs in Biomedical Engineering at IST, coordinated the first and the Master's in Technological Physics Engineering. She also served as a member of the Scientific Council, a member of the University Senate of Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, a member of the Permanent Senate Committee for Scientific Affairs, President of the Department of Physics, President of the Pedagogical Council, a member of the University Senate of the University of Lisbon, and a member of the Permanent Senate Committee for Pedagogical Affairs.

Vítor Cardoso was born in Argivai, Póvoa de Varzim, in 1975. After attending Eça de Queirós High School, he graduated in Technological Physics Engineering from Técnico in 1999. He completed his Ph.D. in Black Hole Physics and Gravitational Waves in 2003 at CENTRA/Técnico and then pursued postdoctoral work in the United States. He spent time at the University of Washington in Saint Louis and later at Oxford Mississippi before returning to Lisbon.

His scientific activity is focused on gravitational interaction, where he has become an international reference in black hole spectroscopy and one of the leading experts in testing Einstein's theory. In 2015, he demonstrated that the absence of an event horizon would lead to the presence of "echoes" in gravitational signals, a signature that has been sought by various international collaborations.

Vítor Cardoso is a founding member of the Portuguese Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. In 2015, he immediately recognized the scientific revolution that was approaching and served as Chair of GWverse, an international consortium of hundreds of scientists exploring gravitational wave astronomy, from 2016 to 2021. He has been a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences since 2022, and in 2015, he was honored by the President of the Portuguese Republic with the title "Order of Saint James of the Sword (Officer)" for his scientific contributions. He is a member of the Scientific Commission for the establishment of the Gulbenkian New Talents in Physics Program and a member of the Gravitation and Cosmology Committee of the Nordita Institute.

He founded the largest Gravitation group in the country, GRIT, in 2009 with the support of his first European Research Council grant. He has held visiting professorships at various institutes, including the Van Der Waals Chair in Amsterdam, a Fellowship at CERN, the University of Pará, the Perimeter Institute, and the Yukawa Institute.

Starting in 2022, he holds the position of Full Professor at Técnico, alongside the position of "Professor of Physics" at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.