Fair warning: it is not easy to summarize 365 days in less than 100 pages, especially when we have so much to share, but we did our best, and the result could not be any more satisfactory. The UT Austin Portugal’s 2021 Annual Report is out, and we invite you to read it.
But before you start browsing through it, let us give you a glimpse of what you can expect:
1- We secured another round of approximately € 800.000 to support a new set of exploratory research projects through a competitive solicitation that attracted over 40 PT-UT consortia. Just to give you an example of what our Portuguese and UT Austin researchers are working on: did you know that one group of researchers is developing a novel nanomaterial-based immunotherapy to re-educate host immunity against breast cancer brain metastases?
2- We launched a pilot action and invited our transatlantic community to come together and submit proposals for short-term advanced training. We organized 13 training activities, attracting more than 1200 registrants from 40 countries.
3- We kept track of 20 active projects: 11 industry-driven projects led by Portuguese SMEs and nine exploratory research projects promoted by academic and research projects.
4- We took the risk and decided that 2021 was a great year to cross new seas, or should we say talks? Yes, we launched our podcast series Cross Talks, inviting our researchers to share what they are studying, and how we, as a society, will benefit from their research. Scientific facts revealed in a language also accessible to non-scientific audiences.
It was quite a year, and we are happy to share some of our community’s most significant accomplishments in 2021, which can be traced to initiatives we supported in the past, showing that impactful change takes time; it does not happen overnight. Read the Annual Report here.
