Sandro Mendonça is Professor at the Department of Economics, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute. He is also Invited Professor at ISEG - University of Lisbon and Visiting Professor at the Dept. of Economics of the University of Insubria, Italy.

He is a German Marshall Fund Fellow since 2012. He was a visiting scholar of King’s College, London, in the Fall of 2012. In 2015 he was nominated “European Young Leader” by the Friends of Europe Foundation. He is faculty of SPRU, the University of Sussex, since 2016. Since 2012 he teaches and supervises at the doctoral programs of the Southern Medical University (Guanghzou) and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (Chengdu). He served as Director of the Economics undergraduate programme at ISCTE Business School (AACSB accredited) during two terms.

He was Scientific Manager of “Science and Society” at CYTED (the Ibero-American program for science and technology, www.cyted.org) from 2014 to 2018, and remained an advisor to the Secretary General. He cooperated with CEN (European Committee for Standardization) and EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Rights Office). He was deputy member of the Management Committee of OceanGov (European Network on “Ocean Governance for Sustainability”, sponsored by the European Science Foundation). 

His research and consultancy work mostly focus on innovation and industrial policy. He is also active in the fields of strategic foresight and conflict research.

His research is cited in a number of scientific papers as well as academic textbooks, professional handbooks and official reports by international organisations, including the European Commission, the OCDE, several UN agencies and programmes (such as WIPO, UNIDO, IPCC), etc.

He holds editorial positions in the following academic journals: Foresight and STI Governance, Frontiers in Sustainability, Public Policy Portuguese Journal, and OBS*.

He has consulted extensively and internationally, both with the public sector and the industrial sector, as well as the “third sector”, both in his country and abroad. 

He has maintained a civic activity for a long time, most visibly in the media. In the past he held opinion columns in magazines like Revista Macau (the Macau-based magazine on Oriental and Portuguese-speaking affairs) and UP (the on-board magazine of TAP, the Portuguese heritage carrier). In terms of newspapers, he held columns in a number of newspapers: Público (Portugal’s reference daily newspaper), Diário de Notícias (the oldest mainstream daily paper) and Diário Económico (a leading Portuguese business newspaper, which survives today as Jornal Económico). He has appeared frequently as commentator at RTP3, SIC-N and TVI-24, cable news networks. At the time of his nomination for ANACOM he held a weekly column in Expresso (Portugal’s leading weekly newspaper). On X-twitter he is @sfm_reg and can also be found on Linkedin. 

He was Executive Board Member (2018-2023) of ANACOM, the Portuguese communications authority with responsabilities for spectrum strategy and manangement, telecoms and postal supervision, submarine cables and outer-space economic activities, and emerging cybersecurity and digital economy challenges.

Sandro Mendonça is member of the advisory board of the monitoring unit of the Portuguese official national authority for cybersecurity (CNCS). He is a member of the governing body of Ceadi, the intelligence council of the Brazilian telecommunications regulator (Anatel). He is an analyst with the mexican-based DPL News, a media and research agency focusing on digital & telecoms in Latin America. He is a columnist at Macau Business magazine and at Jornal Económico. He coordinated the study "The Futures of Big Tech in Europe" (published in 2024) for DG Research, European Commission. And he is a Fellow Economist for DG Grow, European Commission (for the year 2024).