Maria da Graça Carvalho has been deeply involved in the European and national politics in her home country, Portugal. With an academic background in mechanical engineering,  Graça talks us through the importance of science and innovation in Europe and how to get more women in technology jobs. 

Steve Phillips, Secretary General at CEDR, Conference of European Directors of Roads talks about the importance of European roads, the "Green corridors" initiative and the role of freight transport during the pandemic. 

In this episode we talk to Phanthian Zuesongdham - Head of Digital and Business Transformation at the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) about the digitalisation and innovation in one of the worlds biggest ports and how it has dealt with the coronavirus crisis.

Public transport has been hit hard by the recent and still ongoing coronavirus crisis. In this podcast, we talk to Artur Perchel, Deputy Director at UITP - International Association of Public Transport about the recovery of the sector and the shift to shared mobility. 

Maria de Lurdes Antunes is Vice President of National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) in Portugal and President of the Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL). We ask Maria de Lurdes about defining the future trends in transport and infrastructure and how will the new Horizon Europe programme go about them.

The European Commission has recently adopted the new EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, an ambitious, long-term plan for protecting nature and reversing the degradation of ecosystems. In this episode we talk to Humberto Delgado Rosa, Director at DG Environment of the European Commission about the main objectives of the strategy and how we can shift from liking nature to systematically protecting biodiversity.

"We are going to live through a very challenging moment: coronavirus pandemic will bring the worst economic crisis in a century and its outcomes are unpredictable". In this podcast we talk to Paulo Vaz, the business activities leader of “AEP – Associação Empresarial de Portugal”, the biggest and most important Entrepreneurial Association in Portugal and one of most influential business organisations in Europe. We ask Paulo how can Europe recover from the economic crisis and become a global leader?

Pedro São Simão has recently become the coordinator of the Portuguese Plastics Pact (PPP) which has the aim to create a plastic circular economy in Portugal where plastics never become waste.  We talk to Pedro about the ambitious targets of the PPP to completely eliminate unnecessary plastics and shift to 100% recyclable ones by 2025. 

João Falcão e Cunha is dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto. We asked João how his Faculty and students adapted to the new ways of studying and working and what implications will "the new normal" have our working habits in the long run.

In our first podcast we talk to Alina Koskela, Chair of the Management Committee of the Transport Research Arena 2020 conference which was supposed to take place this week in Helsinki, Finland. Just like many other events, it was canceled due to the Corona virus outbreak. What had TRA2020 prepared for you this week and why was Helsinki chosen as host city in the first place?