These honorary titles complete a list of 19 Honoris Causa doctorates already awarded to international reference personalities by our University.
The University of Minho awarded last May 19th, the doctorate in Engineering Honoris Causa to the American Dava Newman and the entrepreneur José Ramos. The moment happened at the Azurém campus, at 16h00, in a ceremony that was also broadcasted on the university’s YouTube channel.
Dava Newman excels as a biomedical aerospace engineer and is especially known for the design of an innovative spacesuit, the BioSuit. She was also the principal investigator on four space missions aboard the Russian space shuttle, the Mir Space Station, and the International Space Station. She is currently director of the MIT Media Lab and a professor at MIT. She was also director of MIT Portugal on two occasions (2011/2015 and 2018/2021).
She has been a principal investigator on four space missions, and was also appointed by Barack Obama as deputy administrator of NASA, becoming the first woman engineer to hold this position. Very involved in sports, she holds a world record for human-propelled hydrofoil speed, and also ran the Boston Marathon in 2014. She has also circumnavigated the world, bringing educational ideals about science, technology, and global change to students around the world, and recently founded EarthDNA, a platform that aims to create a healthy relationship between people, technology, and the planet.
José Ramos is the current CEO of the Salvador Caetano Group and has a degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Porto, and is also president of ACAP – Associação Automóvel de Portugal. During military service he taught at the Industrial School of Alcanena, a position he held until he joined Salvador Caetano in 1968.
In 2002, he was nominated Honorary Consul General of Japan in Oporto for his important role in promoting relations between the two countries. In 2009 he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the City of Vila Nova de Gaia. In 2015 he received the distinction “Order of the Rising Sun, Golden Rays with Ribbon” by the Emperor of Japan and in 2018 the Kaizen Institute Portugal award, for his involvement in a business culture of continuous improvement. More recently he was awarded the Personality of the Year 2020 award by SIC/Expresso and received the Recognition 2022 award from the Auto Observador Awards.
UMinho has already awarded 19 honoris causa
Hans Flasche (1979), Cornelio Sommaruga, Eurico Dias Nogueira, Émile Noel, Eurico Teixeira de Melo (all in 1990), José Veiga Simão (1994), Joaquim Pinto Machado, Francisco Carvalho Guerra, José Luís Encarnação (all in 2002) Joaquim Chissano (2005), Joseph Gonnella, Marcel de Botton, Michel Maffesoli (all in 2011), Nuno Portas (2012), Ramón Villares (2015), Gene Grossman (2016), Álvaro Laborinho Lúcio, Frei Bento Domingues (both in 2019) and Ángel Carracedo (2020).
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