Carlos Moedas
Mayor of Lisbon
Carlos Moedas was born in Beja in 1970. He holds a degree in Civil Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico and attended the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. In 1998, he moved to the United States, where he enrolled at Harvard University and earned a Master of Business Administration.
He began his career as an engineer with the Suez Group in France, worked for several years in the City of London, and later founded his own company in Portugal.
In 2011, he was elected as a Member of Parliament for the Beja constituency and became Secretary of State to the Prime Minister in Portugal’s 19th Constitutional Government, with responsibility for coordinating the Economic Adjustment Programme.
In 2014, he became the fifth Portuguese national to serve as European Commissioner, managing the world’s largest science and innovation fund, worth €80 billion. He was also the architect of the current Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, worth €100 billion.
In 2019, he joined the Board of Trustees of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He is also Vice-President of the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris.
In March 2021, he decided to run for Mayor of Lisbon, creating the Novos Tempos coalition. He was elected Mayor of Lisbon on 26 September 2021 and re-elected on 12 October 2025. He was also elected President of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area and Vice-President of the European Committee of the Regions in Brussels.
In July 2024 was elected by the Parliament as a member of the Portuguese Council of State.
In 2014, he became the youngest member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering. He is also an honorary member of the African Academy of Sciences. He has received several honorary doctorates from University College Cork in Ireland, ESCP Business School in Paris, NOVA University Lisbon, and the West University of Timișoara in Romania. In 2019, he received the Gold Medal of the Portuguese Order of Engineers, and in 2020 he was named Person of the Year by the University of Coimbra. In 2023, he was decorated by Pope Francis as a Knight of the Order of St Sylvester and by the President of the Portuguese Republic with the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry. In 2025, he was decorated with the “Légion d'Honneur” by the French President Emmanuel Macron.