Afonso Pinho Lourenço, CMU Portugal Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto and researcher at GECAD, was selected for a “R&D@USA” grant from Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (FLAD), being among the 8 Master and Ph.D. students that will undertake research internships in the USA, related to innovative scientific or technological topics.
Afonso has enrolled in the CMU Portugal Program in the academic year 2023/2024. His research, supervised by Professors Goreti Marreiros (Instituto Politécnico do Porto & GECAD) and João Gama (FEUP & INESC TEC), focuses on reinterpreting data stream mining as a form of contextualized learning, where each environment provides a context that modulates the predictive function of models.
From August onwards, Afonso will work closely with Professor Eric Poe Xing at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, where he intends to explore how foundation models can make this approach scalable.
According to Afonso,”being selected for this grant presents not only an unique opportunity to advance my research in a world-class scientific environment, but also a step toward establishing myself as a contributor to future Portugal–U.S. collaborations and projects with scientific, technological, and societal impact.”
FLAD awards scholarships to Master and doctoral students, and researchers with doctorates of up to 3 years from Portuguese institutions, to develop research internship programs, with a minimum duration of 4 months, in academic and scientific institutions in the USA.
In 2025, Sofia Ferraz, Affiliated Ph.D. student of Computer Science at FEUP & INESC-TEC, was one of the 16 recipients of the R&D@USA grant for the Fall of 2025, having spent a research period at CMU’s School of Computer Science.
More information about the 2026’s “R&D@USA” co-hort here.