Ricardo Galvão awarded Honorary PhD Degree
Professor Ricardo Galvão, prestigious Brazilian scientist and long-time collaborator of IPFN, was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Lisbon, in recognition of his outstanding academic, scientific and professional contributions, which have been highly recognised worldwide, and his collaboration with Técnico since Portugal entered the path to Nuclear Fusion. The degree, proposed by Instituto Superior Técnico, was awarded in a ceremony that took place last December 4.
Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão is a prominent Brazilian scientist, academic and scientific leader, with a strong link to Universidade de Lisboa, through Instituto Superior Técnico and Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion. He is the current president of Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and a full professor at the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo and holds a PhD from MIT.
He has occupied major positions within the Brazilian research organisations, in particular director of the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF) and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and president of the Brazilian Physical Society. Before that, together with Ivan Nascimento, he led the team that designed and built the TBR-1, the first tokamak in Brazil and Latin America, and later on took the EPFL’s TCA to Brazil, a medium-sized tokamak currently being explored at the Institute of Physics.
As a man of causes, he has always played a civic and social role, helping, for example, to consolidate the Union of Physicists from Portuguese-Speaking Countries (UFPLP), he was a candidate for the Brazilian Congress and he was part of the scientists’ movement “Movimento dos Cientistas Engajados”.
In the afternoon he gave an IST Distinguished Lecture titled “Amazônia e a Atual Política Ambiental Brasileira”, organised by the Physics Department and the Environmental Sciences and Engineering Platform of IST. A video of the lecture is available here.
