2025 RSA Annual Conference Plenary Sessions and Speakers

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Prof. Elisa Ferreira is the European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms. Before that, she was Vice Governor of the Bank of Portugal. During her tenure, she was Portugal’s representative on the Supervisory Board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism. Elisa was previously a Member of the European Parliament, coordinating for the Group of Socialists and Democrats in the EP’s Economic and Monetary (ECON) Committee and was rapporteur, co-rapporteur or shadow rapporteur of many key legislative files, including the ‘six-pack’ and ‘two-pack’, the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) and the regulation creating the Single Resolution Mechanism. In Portugal, Elisa was a Member of the Portuguese National Parliament and Portugal’s Minister for Planning following her term as Portugal’s Minister for the Environment. She has also been Executive Vice President of the Porto Industrial Association, Vice President of Portugal’s Northern Region Coordination Commission and member of the Board of Portugal’s Statistics Authority. She has a degree in economics from the University of Porto, and a master’s degree and PhD from the University of Reading in the UK. She is a professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto (on leave of absence).

Pedro Conceição has been the Director of the Human Development Report Office and the lead author of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since January 2019. Prior to this, Conceição served as the Director of strategic policy at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (from October 2014) and as the Chief Economist and the head of the Strategic Advisory Unit at the Regional Bureau for Africa (from December 2009). Before that, he was the Director of the Office of Development Studies (ODS) from March 2007 to November 2009 and the Deputy Director of ODS from October 2001 to February 2007. His work on financing for development and on global public goods was published by Oxford University Press in books he co-edited (‘The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges’, 2006; ‘Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization’, 2003). He has published on inequality, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in, among other journals, the African Development Review, Review of Development Economics, Eastern Economic Journal, Ecological Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Food Policy, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Mário Vale has a Degree in Geography, a Master’s degree in Human Geography and Local and Regional Planning and a PhD Degree in Human Geography from the University of Lisbon. He holds a position as Full Professor at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon. He was Visiting Research Fellow at CURDS (Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies), at the University of Newcastle) in 2006 and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Geography at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) in 2013. Currently, he is Director of the Centre for Geographical Studies, University of Lisbon, and a member of ZOE research cluster in CEG.
He has been working on urban and regional economic change, especially in the European periphery, combining institutional, evolutionary and political economy perspectives in economic geography. His research has been supported by several research projects of national and international (FP4, 5 and 6, Gremi-T, Integrated Actions and FCT).

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Professor Louise Kempton has over 25 years’ experience as a researcher, policy maker and practitioner in local, regional and international economic development. She joined the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University in 2011 as a Senior Research Associate where her main focus is contributing to an evolving understanding of the role of universities as ‘anchor’ institutions in local/regional economic growth and innovation, and the effects of place in shaping this role. Louise is also interested in the process of building local collaborative leadership to develop innovative solutions to meeting local challenges and opportunities.

From January 2019 to July 2023 Louise served as Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS), assisting the Dean in shaping and implementing the Faculty’s strategy for research and innovation.

Since 1st August 2022 she has been Principal Investigator and Strategic Director of Insights North East, a new £5.5m initiative led by Newcastle University and delivered via a core partnership with the NHS, North of Tyne Combined Authority, Newcastle City Council, and Northumbria University. It is supported by Research England’s Development Fund.

Insights North East will be a demonstrator to illustrate how anchor institutions can collaborate to maximise the potential for university research to inform place-based policy-making and practice, ensuring that future research agendas are demand-led and shaped by the needs of the North East.

Louise is the author/co-author of more than 30 academic and policy publications exploring the barriers and drivers to universities’ involvement in regional innovation and has acted as adviser to local, national and international organisations on the same topic, helping to shape new policy development.

Joana Resende is a business economist. She holds a PhD in Economics and Management Science from Université Catholique de Louvain (double degree with Universidade do Porto) and a 5-year Bachelor degree in Economics from Universidade of Porto.
At the present moment, she is the Pro-Rector at the Universidade do Porto in the area of Strategic Planning. She is also an Assistant Professor (with Habilitation) at Faculdade de Economia do Porto and a Research Director of the Center for Economics and Finance at Universidade do Porto for the area “Theory and Methods”.
Her research interests cover several topics related to firms’ strategies and market outcomes in imperfectly competitive industries. In particular, she has recently been more actively involved in two major research lines:
(i) the development of game theory models to enlighten firms’ and policy-makers about business model innovation and the new competitive dynamics arising in digital markets (covering topics such as network externalities, multi-sided platforms, the analysis of modern forms of price discrimination and the study of product personalization strategies);
(ii) the study of new regulatory challenges arising in energy markets (market design, innovation and distribution generation systems, consumers’ empowerment and economic regulation).
She has also been involved in several academic consultancy teams, which worked on the production of technical reports in the field of Energy Economics for entities such as ERSE (the Portuguese Energy Regulator), Conselho Tarifário da ERSE (ERSE’s Tariff Council) or lawyers’ firms.