Portugal

The University of Porto (U.Porto) is a benchmark institution for Higher Education and Scientific Research in Portugal and one of the top 150 European Universities according to the most relevant international ranking systems, including Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking) and QS World University Rankings 2023, where it stands as #1 Portuguese Higher Education Institution.

U.Porto combines high quality education focused on individual vocations and talents as well as market needs with the claim to being the greatest birthplace of science in Portugal, and being responsible for nearly 25% of the Portuguese scientific articles indexed in the ISI Web of Science. It is committed to converting into social assets the talent and innovation from its 14 faculties, one business school and around 50 research centres, 90% of which evaluated as “Excellent” or “Very Good”. As a comprehensive University, it offers courses in all study areas and all levels of higher education, counting with na employability rate of more than 80%. The U.Porto has the richest academic community in Portugal and brings together the country’s highest ranked students, a highly qualified scientific and teaching staff and a growing number of international students, teachers and researchers. Latest figures indicate over 32 thousand students (19% international), 3.400 FTE

academics & researchers and 1.700 FTE administrative staff. Being open to the community and business is the main trademark of U.Porto.

The University is itself an important driving force for economic, social, cultural and scientific development in Northern Portugal and in the country as a whole. It is a driver for innovation, turning ideas into new products, services and companies, and hundreds of start-ups and thousands of new jobs were created in its premises. The U.Porto is the most international of Portugal’s universities thanks to its active cooperation with hundreds of Higher Education Institutions worldwide. Counting with 6,000 international students from roughly 100 nationalities, internationalisation is indeed one of U.Porto’s strategic pillars, allowing the development of existing alliances and the establishment of innovative cooperation actions with institutions from all over the world (~2200 active agreements).

U.Porto also participates in one of the pioneer European Universities funded by the EC as part of Erasmus+, the EUGLOH, which is an innovative alliance coordinated by Université Paris-Saclay focusing on a unifying and transdisciplinary topic, global health, and that aims at addressing the major societal challenges. It is also important to highlight the strong capacity of U.Porto to attract Erasmus+ projects over recent years. These projects have emerged as an important means of boosting activities leading to the growing internationalisation of the U.Porto, constituting an important source of funding for such activities and enabling the U.Porto to integrate (and strengthen) networks of European organisations (and outside Europe) in projects specifically designed for the field of Education. Since 2014, U.Porto participated in a total of 220 Erasmus+ projects, which represented in total more than 150 million Euros of funding (roughly 53 million Euros directly managed by U.Porto).

Teacher training courses for secondary education in Science are held at the Faculty of Sciences (FCUP). This Faculty has a strong commitment to international students, not only within the EU but also to students from several other countries on different continents and especially from Portuguese Official Language African Countries (PALOP), such as Angola, Brazil, and East Timor. The FCUP has a staff of about 260 persons distributed by 6 scientific departments covering the major areas of science (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, Geosciences and Computer science), and an interdepartmental Unit (Science Teaching Unit) is responsible for all the science education courses.