European Patent Office (EPO) Series: An Advisor to the President
Previous Parts:
Part 14
António Costa greets the third member of the EPO President's entourage, Sandro Mendonça.
In this part we continue our examination of the entourage which accompanied António Campinos to his meeting with António Costa in Brussels on 3rd February 2026.
Our attention now turns to the third member of the EPO President's team, namely Sandro Miguel Ferreira Mendonça.
As we mentioned previously, Sandro Mendonça is a relative newcomer to "Team Campinos". An article published in the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Noticias in December 2024 suggests that he joined the EPO some time during 2024. The article entitled "China leads the way in patent applications relating to power grids" cites Mendonça and refers to him as "a Professor at Iscte and a member of the European Patent Organisation (EPO)".
So who is this Portuguese prodigy and what exactly is his role at the EPO?
Back in December 2024, Mendonça was described by Diário de Noticias as a "Stream Leader for Technology Intelligence at the Observatory on Patents and Technology of the European Patent Office". More recently, his position at the EPO seems to have been upgraded to "Advisor to the President".
On 8th May 2025, in his capacity as a member of the EPO´s Observatory on Patents and Technology, Mendonça attended Plastteknik Nordic 2025 – the largest plastics technology trade fair in Scandinavia held in Malmö (Sweden) – where he gave a talk on the subject of "Plastics in transition: patents as source of intelligence for industrial and ecological renewal".
Sandro Mendonça appearing at Plastteknik Nordic 2025 in Malmö on behalf of the EPO´s Observatory on Patents and Technology (8th May 2025).
Shortly afterwards, on 15th May 2025, when he visited Macau to give an open lecture at the Rui Cunha Foundation on the topic on “Creative Regulatory Environments: Steering the ‘Evolving Sandbox Economy’ from the Greater Bay to the Portuguese-Speaking Geographies”, Mendonça was being billed as "Advisor to the President of the European Patent Office" indicating that he had recently advanced to membership of the "inner circle" of Team Campinos.
One of Mendonça's first recorded official appearances as a member of the EPO President's "inner circle" took place about two months later in Geneva in July 2025 when a meeting was held between the Ukrainian and EPO delegations on the margins of the Assemblies of the Member States of WIPO. The main focus of the meeting was the signing of a renewed "Memorandum on Reinforced Partnership" between the UANIPIO and the EPO.
In July 2025 a meeting took place at the WIPO in Geneva between EPO and Ukrainian delegations where Sandro Mendonça (pictured right) made one of his first recorded official appearances as a member of the EPO President's "inner circle".
In the next part we will present some background information about Mendonça's academic career before he joined the EPO. █