Carlos Moedas

Mayor, Lisbon City Council

He was born in Beja in 1970 and earned a degree in Civil Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico in 1993. The final year of his university studies was completed at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris (1993). In 1998, he moved to the United States, where he enrolled at Harvard University and obtained a Master in Business Administration (1998/2000).

He began his career with the Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Group in France, where he lived for five years. He worked for several years in the City of London, particularly at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

In 2004, he returned to Portugal to lead the company Aguirre Newman, where he also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Group in Spain. In 2008, he founded his own investment management company.

He joined the PSD team that negotiated the 2011 State Budget and was one of the party’s representatives in meetings with the European Union delegation and the International Monetary Fund, within the framework of the economic and financial adjustment programme.

In 2011, he was elected Member of Parliament for the Beja constituency and became Deputy Secretary of State to the Prime Minister in the 19th Constitutional Government, with responsibility for coordinating the Adjustment Programme.

In 2014, he was appointed by the Prime Minister as a member of the European Commission. He served as the Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, managing one of the largest science and innovation programmes in the world (€77 billion). He was the architect of the proposal for the future Horizon Europe programme worth €100 billion, which came into force in 2021. He is the fifth Portuguese national to serve as a European Commissioner since Portugal joined the then EEC in 1986.

In 2019, he joined the Board of Trustees of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He is also Vice-President of the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris.

He co-authored several publications in the fields of Innovation and Science, most notably the article “Open Innovation: Research, Practices and Policies” in the prestigious California Management Review, co-signed with Henry Chesbrough, the originator of the concept of Open Innovation.

In 2014, he was elected the youngest member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering. He is also an honorary member of the African Academy of Sciences. In 2016, he received an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the University of Cork in Ireland, and in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate from ESCP Europe (École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris).

On September 26, 2021, he was elected Mayor of Lisbon.