Ten Public Universities Band Together to Build a National Network for the Exact and Natural Sciences
Ten public universities — from the Azores and Madeira to Porto, Lisbon and Minho — have signed the founding pact of the Consórcio de Escolas de Ciências, pooling teaching, research and outreach across the exact and natural sciences under a rotating, Minho-led structure.
Ten of Portugal's public universities have joined forces to create a national network for the sciences, signing the founding agreement of the Consórcio de Escolas de Ciências (Consortium of Schools of Science, or CEC) at a ceremony at the University of Minho in Braga. The alliance stretches from the mainland to the Atlantic islands and is pitched as a way to pool teaching, research and outreach across the exact and natural sciences.
Who is involved
The founding members are the universities of the Açores (Azores), Algarve, Aveiro, Beira Interior, Évora, Lisboa (Lisbon), Madeira, Minho, Porto and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro. For its first two years the consortium will be headquartered at Minho's School of Sciences and chaired by José Manuel González-Méijome, with the arrangement rotating thereafter.
Fernando Alexandre, the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation, attended the signing, lending government weight to an initiative the universities describe as open to further members — other faculties or departments of public higher education working in the same fields are invited to join later.
What the consortium is for
The stated aim is to strengthen cooperation in advanced training, research and innovation, and to share the work of communicating science to the public. In practice that means the partners can coordinate postgraduate programmes, mount joint research bids, and pool laboratories and equipment that no single institution could justify alone — a model already familiar in other European science systems.
Beyond the campus, the network sets itself the task of nurturing scientific vocations among young people and lifting scientific literacy more broadly, at a time when Portugal, like much of Europe, is struggling to fill places in mathematics, physics and other exact-science degrees.
Why it matters
Portuguese universities have historically competed for the same students, funding and talent. Binding ten of them into a single consortium is an attempt to turn that rivalry into scale — a common front that can speak with one voice to Brussels and to national funders, and that spreads specialist expertise across regions that are often left behind, including the Azores and Madeira.
For students and researchers, the promise is more mobility between institutions, broader course catalogues and easier access to shared facilities. For the wider public, the consortium's success will be measured less by its founding paperwork than by whether it can draw more young people into science and keep Portuguese research competitive. The framework is now in place; the harder work of making a ten-way partnership function begins with the new academic year.
