Alberto Amaral é doutorado pela Universidade de Cambridge, professor da Universidade do Porto e investigador do CIPES - Centro de Investigação de Políticas do Ensino Superior. Foi reitor da Universidade do Porto de 1985 a 1998, é ex-membro do Conselho Executivo da Conferência dos Reitores Europeus, ex-presidente do CHER (Consórcio de Investigadores do Ensino Superior), ex-membro do IMHE (Institutional Management in Higher Education) da OCDE e é membro vitalício da Associação Internacional de Presidentes Universitários.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, where he was previously Head of the Department of Geography and Environment. He is the current holder of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. He is President of the Regional Science Association International, where he served as Vice-President in 2014. He has also been Vice-President (2012-2013) and Secretary (2001-2005) of the European Regional Science Association. He is a regular advisor to numerous international organizations, including the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the Cities Alliance, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America. He is the joint managing editor of Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, an editor of Economic Geography, and sits on the editorial board of 28 other scholarly journals, including many of the leading international journals in economic geography, human geography, regional science, and management.

Francisco Queiró is an Assistant Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics. He holds a PhD in business economics and an MBA from Harvard University, as well as a licenciatura in law from Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Prior to joining Nova, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and before his graduate studies he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Francisco's research focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation, with a particular interest in the determinants of firm growth and the role of entrepreneurship as a driver of economic growth.

Joaquim Oliveira Martins is the Head of the OECD Regional Development Policy Division. Current projects cover regional growth, urban development, regional governance issues, and the determinants of health expenditures. He was former Head of the Structural Economic Statistics Division, focusing on Trade & Globalisation indicators, Productivity measurement and Business statistics. Previously, he was Senior Economist at the Economics Department heading projects on the Economics of Education, Ageing and Growth, and Health Systems. He was also Head of Desk for emerging markets, where he was in charge of the first Economic Surveys of Brazil, Chile and several transition countries. Other OECD monographs focused on Competition, Regulation and Performance and Policy Response to the Threat of Global Warming. He was also Research Fellow at the CEPII (Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales, Paris). He is Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Paris-I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

John Edwards works for the Smart Specialisation Platform at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Seville. He currently leads a project on the role of higher education in smart specialisation, in cooperation with DG Education and Culture. This project includes action research in selected European regions and monitoring of how the European Structural and Investment Funds are being spent on higher education. During the negotiations on the operational programmes of the EU’s Cohesion Policy he assisted DG Regional Policy in the analysis of innovation strategies in the UK and Portugal. John has an academic background in the governance of regional development, having completed his PhD at Newcastle University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies. He also holds degrees in Geography and International Relations from St Andrews University and in European Politics from the College of Europe in Bruges. At home he is kept busy by his four children and also enjoys hill walking and the outdoors.

Madalena Fonseca is a Geographer and Assistant Professor at the University of Porto, Department of Geography. She holds a PhD in Economic Geography. Currently, she is the General Secretary of the Portuguese Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education - A3ES (Lisboa). Her main research topics are currently linked with higher education and human capital: offer and demand of higher education, access, the Portuguese higher education system, higher education and regional development and quality assurance. She is a member of the Board of the European Consortium for Accreditation – ECA (The Hague) and the international expert for international accreditations of the German agency ZEVA (Hannover). She takes part in two Erasmus+ research projects on strategic partnerships for higher education. She is the author and co-author of a large number of papers and chapters of books in the field of economic geography and regional development.

Ugo Fratesi is Associate Professor of Regional Economics at Politecnico di Milano since December 2010. He is Editor of main section papers and Book Review Editor of Regional Studies since 2013. Previously, he was member of the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Regional Science. He was member of the Council of the Italian Section of the Regional Science Association International (AISRe) for the period 2010-2016 and was its Treasurer for the period 2010-2013. He has been involved with various roles in a large number of research project, especially at European level, financed by the Espon programme, the FP5, FP7, Horizon 2020 or the European Commission directly. He is co-author of several books and author of a large number of papers published in refereed journals in the field of regional economics, primarily on the themes of regional growth and development, the models for forecasting regional growth, regional policy, the theory and measurement of regional disparities, the territorial aspects of human capital and innovation.