Manuel Heitor is a Visiting Research Professor at NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), and at the NYU Marron Institute. He is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard´s Graduate School of Design.
Manuel Heitor is Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, IST, the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon, and was the founding director of IN+, the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research at IST. From November 2015 to March 2022 he served as Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education in the Government of Portugal and from March 2005 to June 2011 he served as Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education. Overall, he served more than 12.5 years in the Government of Portugal. In 2022 he received the Honorary Doctor in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and was nominated “IST Distinguished Professor.”
In addition to his engineering research, Professor Heitor has worked and published extensively in the interrelated fields of technology management, innovation, and science and higher education policy. While in the Government of Portugal, he was successfully involved in attracting public and private investment in R&D, growing the research landscape of the country, and in the reform and modernization of higher education (including, but not limited to, reforms under the Bologna Process). He launched the program “Go-Portugal – Global Science and Technology Partnerships Portugal” and was instrumental in forming international consortia for research and advanced education with several U.S. universities (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UT Austin), including consortia are of varying types and scale, industry relationships and technology commercialization activities.
Heitor has published over 130 scientific articles and supervised over 40 post-grad students. Read more about Professor Heitor’s background.