The name Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA) stands for creativity and innovation. Proud of its youth, as the most recent public university within the Lisbon metropolitan area, NOVA extends through three municipalities: Lisbon, Almada and Oeiras. Despite its youth, the thirty seven years of existence in the Metropolitan area provide a solid experience, and, nowadays, the University has over 18.000 students, about 1 400 teachers and 769 employees.

The singularity of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa’s project depends on its assumed dispersion in the city, characterized by two main campi: Campolide (Rectory Building, Economics and Management, Law, Statistics and Information Management) and Caparica (Sciences and Technology), as well as several locations where the remaining teaching and research units are installed: Social Sciences and Humanities, Medicine, Public Health, Tropical Medicine, Technological Biology and Chemistry.

This singularity demands an increasing respect for the individuality of each School, Faculty or Institute, which have acquired and consolidated their image and prestige in a space of freedom, diversity and tolerance that has guided the culture of NOVA. But it is also characterized by an effort to strengthen the cohesion between Academic Units, in order to take the best possible advantage of the synergies that can be generated and developed between them.

The quality of teaching, now stimulated by the success of the application of the Bologna declaration to all our courses from the 1st and 2nd cycle, as well as an increasing number of 3rd cycle proposals, show the capacity of NOVA to present itself as an European higher education institution.

The quality of our research, excellent in many areas, is another main pillar that supports the internationalization culture that characterizes NOVA, not limited to the European space, but also spreading to the Americas and Africa.

This clear option for a unique but diversified identity, working not only as a network of institutions but also of projects, people and resources, characterizes NOVA as a University that is opened to the world and willing to take part in the challenges presented by the 21st Century.

António Rendas
Rector