As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, the School of Engineering invites the entire academic community and other interested parties to attend the debate ‘Strategies for the Future of Higher Education’, which aims to bring different perspectives and visions about the future of higher education in Portugal to the academic community of the University of Minho.

Olga Pombo

Master’s degree in Modern Philosophy, PhD in History and Philosophy of Education, Aggregation in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Lisbon. She was a professor (until 2016) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at FCUL, where she was chair from its foundation in 2007 until 2012.
Founder and coordinator of the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon and the FCT Doctoral Programme in Philosophy of Science, Technology, Art and Society at the same university (until 2016). She has published around 150 titles in Portugal and abroad on Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language, Encyclopaedism and Hypertext, Philosophy of Education and, more recently, on Science and Art, which she began teaching in Portugal.
She is the coordinator of several national and international projects, a founding member of the Société de Philosophie des Sciences (Paris), an honorary member of the International Association for the Study of Controversies (AISC) and a member of the scientific council of the Réseau National des Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris, 2015-2022).
She was selected as one of the 100 figures in the book Mulheres na Ciência (Women in Science), published by Ciência Viva in 2016. She is currently chair of the General Assembly of the Portuguese Society of Logic and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Coimbra.

Alexandre Quintanilha

Born in 1945. He spent the first 16 years of his life in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the next 10 years in Johannesburg, where he graduated, and the following 20 years in California’s Bay Area. He has been living in Portugal since 1991.
He has been fortunate to lead numerous working groups and to interact with immensely inspiring people. He holds a PhD in physics and has studied oxidative stress in living beings and how we deal with risk.
He has created and helped to create several research centres and courses of study at the Universities of Berkeley and Porto, always multidisciplinary.
He has chaired numerous committees at national and international level. As a parliamentarian, he has contributed to knowledge-based policy.

Luis António Santos

Professor of Communication Sciences at the University of Minho. He holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho and a Master’s degree in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – University of London.
He was a journalist for over a decade. He started at the “pirate” Rádio Universitária do Porto and worked at Jornal de Notícias, Diário de Notícias (as a correspondent in London) and the BBC World Service.
He is interested in the changes taking place in journalism, the formats that help to rethink it, and the regulatory architectures of new information spaces.
He is an elected member of the General Council of the University of Minho and deputy director of the Centre for Communication and Society Studies.
He has been a regular presence in the media.

Admission is free, but subject to pre-registration here by 12 November.

NOTE: Information regarding the exact location on the Azurém campus of UMinho where the debate will take place will be provided closer to the date of the event.