The Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, opens the Security Research and Innovation Campus in Ispra today. The Campus brings together existing and new laboratories and connects JRC researchers with practitioners from Member States, EU agencies and other organisations.

Georgios Giannopoulos, Acting Director of the JRC’s Societal Resilience and Security Directorate, sets out the purpose of the Campus in conversation with Ricardo Migueis, Head of the INESC Brussels HUB, in the first episode of the INESC × JRC series on The Insider. The conversation covers the problems the Campus is meant to address, among them the fragmentation of knowledge and approaches across Europe, the time research takes to reach operational use, and the lack of common testing and standards across research facilities.

The JRC sets out concrete ways to take part, from training courses to short visits, secondments of at least one month and hosting agreements to work in its laboratories.

The five INESC institutes and the JRC have had a formal framework since 28 January, when they signed a memorandum of understanding in Coimbra.

Listen to the first episode of season three.

Over the years, INESC TEC’s research into electric vehicles has largely involved testing technology developed at the Institute through pilot projects with several partners. In 2026, INESC TEC created a dedicated smart electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Installed at the headquarters (located on the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto campus), it enables the Institute’s internal community to charge their electric vehicles, but that is not all: at the same time, it serves as a living lab for developing the power grids of the future.

Charging an electric vehicle at INESC TEC today means more than simply plugging a car into a power supply. The charging infrastructure available at INESC TEC’s headquarters has been completely renewed and now incorporates a new generation of smart chargers developed by the Institute itself, as part of the European GREEN.DAT.AI project.

Ana Teresa Freitas opens with the case of Sofia, aged six. In 2019, the laboratory looking into her seizures and developmental delay found a variant in one gene and classified it as benign, of no clinical significance. Her family was left without an answer. Five years later a doctor read that same result again, by which point hospitals across Europe had sequenced the genomes of thousands of children with similar symptoms and new research on the gene had been published. The variant was the cause of her disease, even though Sofia’s DNA remained exactly as it was in 2019. The name was not chosen at random, the author explains, recalling the character in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, who discovers with each chapter that yesterday’s certainty has to be revised.

The INESC-ID researcher uses the case to show that the data training AI models in healthcare needs continuous curation by specialists, and that pooling information from many patients, the condition for telling real patterns from mere coincidence, means protecting every one of them. INESC-ID’s Life and Health Technologies line works on building these secure data-sharing environments with hospitals, universities and other Portuguese institutions, a step the author considers essential if Portugal is to develop genuinely personalised medicine.

Read the full article in Portuguese.