​Marco Bravo is an Engineering and Industrial Management University of Minho alumnus (class of 1999). He complemented his academic curriculum doing graduate studies at Mikkeli Polytechnic, Hannover University, Technical University of Lisbon, Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Texas at Austin.

Currently he is Project Director at the IC² Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, coordinating the UT Austin|Portugal collaborative program. He is also Executive Director of the Southwest NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) node. His expertise focuses on entrepreneurial wealth creation, international innovation, and global technology commercialization.

As an entrepreneur, Marco Bravo has co-founded three companies and a business angel fund, and actively mentored 120+ technology startups and entrepreneurs from multiple countries. He was also a scholar at the University of Minho and at the Engineering School of Porto University. In industry, he worked at Continental AG, in Germany and in Portugal, initially as Production Superintendent and later as Production Department Manager.

Marco Bravo has been advisor and chief of staff of the State Secretariat for Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Portuguese Government where he helped to plan and implement national policies on science and technology commercialization development. He was also the national project coordinator of the European-wide Eureka Program. He was co-responsible for developing International Partnerships Program in S&T between Portugal and MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Fraunhofer Institute, and Harvard Medical School. He also led the creation of UTEN (University Technology Enterprise Network), a global initiative for the promotion of technology transfer and commercialization.