Manuel Heitor
Biography
Manuel Heitor was born in September 1958.
He is a Full Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, at the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, IN+/IST, and holds a PhD from Imperial College London in Mechanical Engineering (Experimental Combustion, 1985).
He did postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, 1986, and later pursued an academic career at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, where he started his research activity in the area of energy and environment, with emphasis on Fluid Mechanics and Experimental Combustion.
He served as Deputy President of the Instituto Superior Técnico between 1993 and 1998, and since the early 1990s has been devoted to the study of science, technology and innovation policies, including higher education policies and management. In 1998 he founded the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, IN+, of IST, which was named in 2005 as one of the Top 50 global centres of research on Management of Technology, by the International Association for the Management of Technology, IAMOT.
He has coordinated, among others, IST's PhD programmes in Engineering and Public Policy and in Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing Systems. He was Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, at the IC2 Institute, Innovation, Creativity and Capital, and during the academic year 2011/12 he was Visiting Professor at Harvard University, both in the United States of America.
He was Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education in the Government of Portugal from 2015-2022 and Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education between March 2005 and June 2011. He served for more than 12 years in the Government of Portugal.