The hitherto non-executive director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Jorge Vasconcelos will replace executive director Guilherme d’Oliveira Martins on the board of directors of that entity, following the latter’s retirementthe foundation announced this Wednesday, December 10th.
In a statement, Gulbenkian realized that Jorge Vasconcelos’s place as non-executive member of that body was replaced by lawyer Margarida Couto.
The board of directors of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is thus made up of the president, António M. Feijó, the executive directors António Cruz Serra, Cristina Casalinho and Jorge Vasconcelos, and the non-executives Graça Andresen Guimarães, Pedro Norton, Isabel Capeloa Gil and Margarida Couto.
With a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and a PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Jorge Vasconcelos is a guest professor at the European University Institute and the University of Economics in Vienna, and has been president of NEWES, New Energy Solutions since 2007.
According to the biography provided by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where Jorge Vasconcelos has been a non-executive director since 2022, he was co-founder and chairman of the general assembly of the Portuguese Association for Energy Economics and the Portuguese Association for Energy Law. He was also the first president of the Energy Services Regulatory Authority.
For her part, Margarida Couto has a degree in Law and a postgraduate degree in European Studies from the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Lisbon, and is a founding partner of the law firm Vieira de Almeida & Associados, of which she has been a member since 1988.
“In recent years he has dedicated his professional activity to the area of Sustainability in general and to ESG (‘Environmental, Social and Governance’) themes in particular, coordinating in particular the ESG Executive Program of [Vieira de Almeida] Academia and the ‘ESG Strategy and Reporting’ Program of the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics (CLSBE), in which she also teaches”, can be read in the biography sent in the same statement, which also states that Margarida Couto is “responsible for the Women on Boards Executive Program, an initiative to promote female leadership at VdA Academia launched in 2018”.
According to Gulbenkian, the inauguration ceremony will take place on Friday.