Biography
Joana Mendonça is associated professor with habilitation at Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon. She was President of the Board of the Nacional Innovation Agency in Portugal (ANI) between May 2021 and March 2023. Between 2010 and 2012, she was Deputy Director at the Directorate for Education and Science Statistics (DGEEC). She is a member of the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, IN+, where she led the Laboratory of Technology Management and Policy (until 2021) and has developed research activities on management of technology and innovation, as well as technology commercialization and adoption. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Research Policy, Small Business Economics and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. She was scientific director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Partnership (2012-2021), sponsored by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation and scientific coordinator at the Center of Engineering and Product Development, CEiiA, (2018-2021).
Joana joined the Engineering and Management Department at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) as an assistant professor in January 2017 and became associate professor in January 2020. She has taught courses on Entrepreneurship Theory, Engineering Economics and Project Appraisal and Innovation Management and Design Thinking, to Undergraduates, Masters, and PhDs students. At the Engineering and Management Department, she co-coordinated the Master program in Engineering and Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Doctoral program in Engineering and Public Policy. In addition, she was a member of the executive committee of the Department and the Deputy-Director of the Committee for the competitiveness and funding of IST 20-30.
During 2016, she was an assistant to the Minister for Economy for issues related to Innovation and Technology and in 2009-2010, she was an assistant to the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education, both in the Government of Portugal.
Joana obtained her PhD in Engineering and Industrial Management at IST, University of Lisbon, in 2009. In 2008, she was invited research at ZEW (Centre for European Economic Research). She has a master’s degree in engineering policy and Management of Technology, and a Diploma in Chemistry from Lisbon University.
Among other awards, Joana won the Best Paper Award at the Interdisciplinary European Conference on Entrepreneurship Research (IECER) in 2015 with the paper Business Owners' Educational Skills and Entrepreneurial Teams on Workers Wages: The Role of Business Owners Gender, co-authored with Filipa Madeira and Miguel Torres.
She is the mother of two wonderful daughters.