The jury has recognized four finalists for the 2011 Portuguese American Post-Graduate Society (PAPS) Leadership Awards contest. The winner will be announced at the 10th PAPS Forum, to take place in New York, April 16. The finalists are:

Vasco Calais Pedro, Ph.D.
Vasco Calais Pedro is the founder and CEO of Bueda, a web-focused startup in Pittsburgh, PA. He recently completed his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Language Technologies and is a Fulbright Scholar.

João Canning-Clode, Ph.D.
Canning-Clode is a Post-doctoral fellow in the Marine Invasions Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland, USA, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. His research has provided first insights on the effects of heavy metal pollution as disturbance in shaping patterns of exotic versus native diversity in marine fouling.

Cristina Correia
Cristina Correia is a final year graduate student at 3B’s Research Group, University of Minho, Portugal, and during the past year she has developed some tasks of her project at Columbia University, New York, at the Laboratory of Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. The diligence she had while in the US led to the development of four independent projects that generated a set of results that are being prepared for submission to international peer-reviewed journals as first author.

Ricardo Oliveira, Ph.D.
Upon finishing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, Ricardo Oliveira unleashed his entrepreneurship and leadership potential and moved to the Silicon Valley to found ThousandEyes, a company delivering enterprise solutions to optimize the availability, performance and security of web applications and services.

 PAPS is an independent, non-profit organization, with no political affiliations. Its main objective is to network the Portuguese postgraduate community in North America with the academic community in Portugal.

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