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Adam de Sola Pool is an investor and startup mentor. He has helped to start approximately 20 companies in the energy and cleantech space including what was at the time Europe’s largest windfarm, Bulgaria’s first solar PV projects, Hungary’s first post-communist private waste water treatment company and Romania’s first private gas to the home company.
Through his own Hong Kong based Strategic Enterprises Limited Björn Segerblom is now engaged in selected board and project assignments with main focus upon Hong Kong and Asia. Based in Hong Kong he was earlier for more than 12 years engaged by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, a statutory body with the goal to transform Hong Kong into the regional hub for innovation and technology, as Overseas Representative in Europe with main focus upon the Scandinavian countries, UK and Belgium, also having opened up in Germany, France and Switzerland.
Magnus Ryde formerly served as CEO of DayStar Technologies of Milpitas, CA, Intematix Corporation of Fremont, CA and FlexICs of Milpitas, CA; President of TSMC North America. He also held senior executive positions at KLA-Tencor, the world’s leading supplier of process control and yield management solutions for the semiconductor industry.
Since 2008, Alexandre Mendes has been putting best efforts to help country overcome the economic crisis and change paradigm when fostering knowledge transference from universities and R&D institutions. Being resourceful and an infinite learner, Alexandre works passionately to deliver tangible results and to engage a network of stakeholders for a shared purpose.
Lorena Diéguez joined INL in 2014 as Staff Researcher and is, since May 2018, the leader of the Medical Devices research group. Her research is focused in the development of biomicrofluidic devices mainly devoted to Translational Medical Research in close collaboration with Hospitals. For that purpose, her work is devoted to the development of integrated biosensing systems and nanobioengineered diagnostics microsystems for the isolation and characterization of Tumor Cells from body fluids of cancer patients, as well as the development of microfluidic organ-on-a-chip 3D models.
Dr Sara Abalde-Cela is a Staff Researcher at the INL in Braga, Portugal (2019-now). She works within the Medical Devices group, and her research focuses on the development of optofluidic platforms for the diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. Mainly, she applies Raman spectroscopy as an interrogation technique to develop novel biosensors, mostly directed to the detection of single cells and metastasis underlying mechanisms.
Begoña Espiña is, since October 2016, the Leader of the Water Quality Research Group within the Department of Life Sciences at INL. Dr. Espiña focuses her research on developing portable and remote biosensors and devices based on nanomaterials for the selective capture of water chemical contaminants as well as developing methods for nanomaterials’ fate, bioaccumulation and toxicity with special emphasis in implementing the safety-by-design concept.
Since 2008, Alexandre Mendes has been putting best efforts to help country overcome the economic crisis and change paradigm when fostering knowledge transference from universities and R&D institutions. Being resourceful and an infinite learner, Alexandre works passionately to deliver tangible results and to engage a network of stakeholders for a shared purpose.
Rodolfo serves as Senior Associate at Armilar Venture Partners, Portugal’s leading VC funds manager, focused on early-stage technology-based startups in ICT, HealthTech and CleanTech. He has a degree in Aerospace Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico and holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Rodolfo started his career as a Trainee at the European Space Agency and has over 14 years of prior experience in space strategy, technology transfer, IP and sales.
Nuno is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in growing, managing and scaling high growth tech and non-tech businesses. With an exciting journey, Nuno have worked in large multinationals, managed biz dev teams, lead transformation initiatives and lifted startups from the ground up.
Miguel Amador is the Regional Manager for Portugal at EIT Health, a consortium of over 150 partners from leading businesses, research centres and universities from across the EU focus on Education, Innovation and Business Creation. He is also the Founder of Pi Ventures, a Startup Builder supporting innovation in Digital Health, building several ventures ranging from AI for diagnostics, to regulatory technology for Digital Health, and decentralized data.
João Aroso has been working since mid-2017 at Advertio, where he is leading a group of talented people aiming to revolutionise the digital advertisement market.
In 2009, he created his first company and was able to make it profitable, guaranteeing an annual return to investors of 10%+. He made it grow by over 100% YoY consistently. As a result, he was invited to design and implement a turnaround in the Portuguese Yellow Pages. In 2014, he headed the product team driving +30% YoY growth in the products was responsible for. Mid-2015, he sold all the equity he had in the above-mentioned companies to his co-founder and to a private equity firm, looking forward to a new chapter in his professional journey.
Heitor has almost 20 years experience as an VC executive, having been responsible for deal flow and VC operations in Portugal, the USA, UK and Germany, mainly focused on supporting early-stage companies in generating and closing strategic deals: commercially, funding and M&A.
Heitor has held board positions in 12 companies in Portugal, UK and USA, where he often acted as interim-CEO and interim-CFO and head of international operations in the areas of clear energy, electronics, new materials and software.
Rui Lopes has a degree in Computer Science and a Master in Regional and Urban Planning. In his professional activity, he has been associated with entrepreneurship, being the founder of several ICT companies and assuming management functions at Associação Inova-Ria. With a strong motivation for personal relationships, he has been involved in activities related to people training, team management, partnership management and design/execution of technological projects. He is currently attending a doctoral program in Public Policies, focusing his research on place-sensitive digital innovation strategies, especially in rural and remote areas.
Cristina is a tech entrepreneur passionate about solving problems while learning and focusing on good execution.
At work I’ve been wearing various hats, be it engineering and coding, design and user experience, product management, customer relations, processes or knowledge management. I am a passionate speaker and mentor and one of the first promoters of entrepreneurship in Portugal.
Catarina acts as a VP Operations at Smartex.ai, and has previously founded a TechStars startup with the help of giant contract manufacturer Flextronics in southern China. She is passionate about hardware development and manages all manufacturing and field operations efforts inside Smartex.ai
