Alexandre Guedes da Silva - World Patients Alliance

I’m from Algarve, I’m 54 years old and I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 44 and today I am the President of the Portuguese Multiple Sclerosis Society. I graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico, where I was a Researcher and Teacher for more than a decade. This was followed by a commitment to entrepreneurship where I helped to develop several business ideas and where I learned the importance and nobility of leading dedicated teams. The production of content for Television and the Multimedia environment were some of those ventures that opened new horizons for me in both Teaching and Research, this time at the Lusíada University of Lisbon where I actively collaborated on the Degree in Communication and Multimedia for a decade.

However, sport has always been my passion both as a practitioner, as a manager and also as a manager. I was also involved in sports management for another decade, first at the Fixação Gymnasium at IST and then at the Physical Activity and Recreation Center (CEDAR) at UTL. I was also a volunteer director of several clubs and even a Sports Federation, in this case the Portuguese Orienteering Federation and helped organize several dozen amateur sporting events, especially Adventure and Orienteering.

At the end of my career in public service, I had the happiness of working in the management support teams of several Rectors and collaborating in supporting students through the Social Services that the University offers them.

Today, I seek that this rich journey of experiences can bring useful contributions in the defence of the weakest, those to whom SPEM is concerned with caring and giving dignity every day. And that makes me today an active, interventionist Patient Advocate who always seeks to make useful proposals for the problems he presents.