On June 18, 2026, the LSRE-LCM/FEUP team participated in the VAL2FOOD - Valorisation of Agricultural Crop Processing Waste for Sustainable Packaging and Food Shelf-LifeExtension consortium meeting, held in Romania and hosted by the project coordinator, Silver Rom Agro (SRA).

The meeting brought together representatives from all project partners, including SRA (Romania), FEUP/LSRE-LCM and INOVA+ (Portugal), and Bangor University (Wales, UK). FEUP was represented by the project Principal Investigator, Andreia Ribeiro, and researcher Isabel Martins.

The meeting provided an opportunity to review the project's progress, discuss the implementation of the different workpackages, and align the next technical and management activities.

Funded under the VInnovate 2024 programme of the Vanguard Initiative Bioeconomy Pilot, VAL2FOOD is an international collaborative project focused on the valorisation of agricultural processing residues through a biorefinery approach, aiming to recover high-value bioactive compounds and lignocellulosic fibres for the development of active food packaging and food shelf-life extension technologies, contributing to the transition towards a circular and sustainable bioeconomy.

Ana Luísa Rodrigues Machado, a Master's student in Chemical and Biological Engineering carrying out her dissertation at LSRE-LCM and a research fellow under the LIGHT2H2O project, has been awarded a Merit Award by the Northern Regional Branch of the Portuguese Order of Engineers (OERN) as part of the 2nd Edition of the OERN Master's Awards.

Ana Luísa is conducting her Master's dissertation entitled "A Multimodal Machine Learning Framework for Photocatalyst Design in Hydrogen Production", under the supervision of Maria José Sampaio, Cláudia Gomes da Silva, and Idelfonso Nogueira (NTNU).

More info: https://www.oern.pt/noticias/oern-distingue-52-estudantes-na-2-a-edicao-dos-premios-de-mestrado/