IJUP — Young Research at University of Porto

Constant knowledge advancement and innovation progress is one of the components of the University mission. These enhancements are mainly supported by academics and students. Student involvement in research and development activities at any level, particularly at freshman level while they are still adapting to the higher education learning style, is sometimes considered unsuitable. This perception is no longer the understanding of those responsible for R&D policy at the University of Porto (U.Porto). A call for projects, under the “Scientific Research at Undergraduate Level” programme, has been launched by U.Porto for the first time in 2004, a pioneering initiative in Portugal. In 2007 a new programme came up in this area and it has been named IJUP, the Portuguese acronym for “Young Research at U.Porto”. This annual programme integrates a call for project submission and a final two-day Scientific Meeting. Since 2004 the project calls have been open to all scientific areas of U.Porto, in a completely multidisciplinary perspective, fostering the cross-fertilization activity between students and academics from different areas. The last two authors are from the engineering area and have been engaged in these programs since 2004, in several multidisciplinary projects. This paper highlights various aspects of these initiatives and their achievements along the past 8 years and reports a few examples of applied engineering projects involving the two last authors.