Professor dos Santos receives the Leonardo Da Vinci medal

The SEFI Leonardo Da Vinci medal has been awarded to Portuguese Professor José Carlos Diogo Marques dos Santos,  former Rector of the University of Porto, for his outstanding contribution to engineering education, which has had an international significance.

The awardee has been the first Director of the 5 year Programme on “Informatics Engineering” of the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (1994 – 2001), was deeply involved in the design of two MSc programs at FEUP and in several revisions of the Programme in “Electrical Engineering and Computing”. He has created from scratch two laboratories at FEUP: Digital Electronics and Image Processing.

Since October 1990 he has dedicated his activity fully to university management, first as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering (1990 – 2001), then as Vice-rector of the University of Porto (2002 – 2006) and finally as Rector of the University of Porto (2006 – 2014). Under his leadership it has been possible to strategically reinforce the cooperation of the University of Porto with society and in particular with companies and other organisations, as well as increase strongly the level of internationalisation of the University, attracting students from more than 100 countries.

He has been the chair of the committee for evaluation of all the “Informatics for Management” Programmes of Portuguese Universities and Politechnics (2001/2002). Furthermore, he has been National (Portuguese) Delegate to ESPRIT Programme of the European Commission during three years. He has been National Representative to the “Expert group on research infrastructures” of the European Union (October 2001 till February 2002).

Presently, after retirement in the 1^st of July 2014, he is cooperating with the The Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto and with a research Institute called INESC TEC to create and run an applied research Laboratory in Added Value Manufacturing, based in a Learning and Innovation Factory.