João Costa - Biography#

João Costa is the Portuguese Minister of Education. He integrated the Portuguese Government in 2015, serving as Secretary of State for Education until 2019 and as Deputy Minister of Education until 2022, when he was appointed Minister of Education.

Chair of the Governing Board of “Teaching and Language International Survey – TALIS”, and co-chair and member of the Advisory Board of the Global Forum “Future of Education and Skills 2030”, at OECD.

Full Professor of Linguistics at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, he holds a PhD in Linguistics (1998), from Leiden University and was a visiting scholar at MIT in 1996.

Dean of Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa until November 2015, and Chair of the Scientific Council for Social Sciences and Humanities from the Portuguese Research Council (FCT), until November 2015.

He was a Member of the Scientific Council of the National Reading Plan, of the National Commission of the International Institute for Portuguese Language, and of the Advisory Board of Camões Institute.

At his University, he coordinated the Graduate Program in Linguistics and the PhD/Research Program in Linguistics. He has supervised more than 40 PhD and MA dissertations, and was Principal Researcher for several funded research projects in the area of language acquisition.

He coordinated a National Program for Professional Development of teachers of Portuguese, and was in charge of the final version of a Linguistic Terminology for grammar teaching in Portuguese schools.

President of the Portuguese Linguistics Society (2006-2008).

Invited professor at universities in Brazil, Macao, Spain, The Netherlands and Italy.

He dedicates his research activity to the domains of theoretical syntax, language acquisition and development, and educational linguistics, authoring several journal articles, book chapters and books.

Full CV