The PhD Open Days are back at the Técnico Innovation Center on October 27 and 28.
This event offers a unique opportunity for over a thousand PhD students to connect, network, and showcase their research to the academic community, industry professionals, and alumni. The program includes debates, round tables, pitch competitions, and a permanent poster exhibition featuring work by the students.

This year’s edition will address topics such as funding, connection with society, and research in the areas of energy, sustainability, and health, as well as their relationship with electrical and computer engineering.

On October 27, Leonel Sousa, coordinator of the Técnico Doctoral School, will speak during the Invited Talks session: "PhDs in Society". He will be followed by André Martins, who will share his perspective on research funding in the talk "From a PhD to an ERC Grant". His research — funded by an ERC Starting Grant (DeepSPIN) and a Consolidator Grant (DECOLLAGE), among others — focuses on deep learning systems for natural language processing (NLP).

In the afternoon, the panel discussion "Life and Health" will feature Catarina Barata, a researcher developing AI-based technologies for cancer detection. Later, the session "Clean Energies and Sustainability" will include Pedro Carvalho, a specialist in electric grid planning and operations.

On October 28, the round table "Navigating the PhD: Voices from Students and Alumni" will feature Ricardo Lameirinhas, an alumnus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a researcher in photovoltaic technologies, photonics, and semiconductors. Following that, the Alumni Session will feature João Gante, also an alumnus of the same program and currently a Machine Learning Engineer on the Open-Source team at Hugging Face, where he leads text generation development in the “transformers” library.

After lunch, during the pitch competition, PhD students Gonçalo Vieira de Figueiredo, Miguel Ângelo da Silva Graça, Pedro Martin, and Shima Mohammadi will present their research to the community. Additionally, Gonçalo Teixeira, Jose Senart, Luís Crespo, Maria Inês Conceição, Miguel Ângelo da Silva Graça, Paulo Machado, Pedro Ricardo Neto Mendes, and Rui Bettencourt will showcase their work through the permanent poster exhibition.

Check out the full program here: https://phdopendays.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/