Universidade Católica Portuguesa at Porto (UCP-CRP) is a well-established University – located in the North of Portugal, focused both on Teaching and Research and complementing its mission with a range of activities related to society with a focus on promoting Partnerships, Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer. It has 6 Faculties: Education and Psychology, Management and Economics, Biotechnology, Health Studies, Arts, Law and Theology.
The Faculty of Biotechnology (ESB) founded in 1984, offers five EMI undergraduate programs (Food Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering), Nutrition Sciences and Microbiology, with over 800 students, and various EMI based MSc (Food Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Applied Microbiology, Biotechnology and Innovation; and European Masters Programmes such as ERASMUS); and Emi based PhD programs (Biotechnology, Oenology; and Food and Nutrition). ESB harbours the CBQF, a research unit that hosts over 200 researchers. CBQF has consistently achieved the rating of Very Good in international evaluations. The main research orientation of CBQF is „One Health“ for the health and well-being of the citizen.
Due to internationally recognized research and academic activities, the Faculty of Biotechnology (UCP-ESB) has systemically developed different approaches to internationalization with English as the teaching and learning language, and encompassing these efforts with innovation in the learning approaches that allow better articulation of the learning offer and the needs of the society.
A key approach to learning at all levels is learning by research. Most of the work at the Research Center is English based on what concerns funding, reporting, publication and presentation. Some examples are: the Research Clubs for the BSc programs; a research-based work as the basis of different courses at the MSc programs; all the PhD Thesis have to be written in English by the students. Specific student-centred approaches were undertaken to expose students to presentations, communications, pitches, for different target publics and in different contexts.
BSc students conduct public presentations in English since the first year (this year the topics were about: Biotechnology and the SDG). At the MSc level integrated Project Based Learning approaches such as Innovation Track encourage the students to New Product Development articulated to a Business Plan development and Pitches in contexts like Ecotrophelia European Competition and other international events delivered in English.
The PhD students in applied research, are encouraged to think in international business terms, in drafting patents, and integrate international research projects where English is a working language. Recent programs offered or promoted to Create Value out of Research are CoHiTec or Lab2Business.
At all levels of studies, Erasmus students from other European Universities are accepted so all the Courses are ready to be taught in English.
