Madalena Fonseca is a Geographer and Assistant Professor at the University of Porto, Department of Geography. She holds a PhD in Economic Geography. Currently, she is the General Secretary of the Portuguese Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education - A3ES (Lisboa). Her main research topics are currently linked with higher education and human capital: offer and demand of higher education, access, the Portuguese higher education system, higher education and regional development and quality assurance. She is a member of the Board of the European Consortium for Accreditation – ECA (The Hague) and the international expert for international accreditations of the German agency ZEVA (Hannover). She takes part in two Erasmus+ research projects on strategic partnerships for higher education. She is the author and co-author of a large number of papers and chapters of books in the field of economic geography and regional development. Ugo Fratesi> is Associate Professor of Regional Economics at Politecnico di Milano since December 2010. He is Editor of main section papers and Book Review Editor of Regional Studies since 2013. Previously, he was member of the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Regional Science. He was member of the Council of the Italian Section of the Regional Science Association International (AISRe) for the period 2010-2016 and was its Treasurer for the period 2010-2013. He has been involved with various roles in a large number of research project, especially at European level, financed by the Espon programme, the FP5, FP7, Horizon 2020 or the European Commission directly. He is co-author of several books and author of a large number of papers published in refereed journals in the field of regional economics, primarily on the themes of regional growth and development, the models for forecasting regional growth, regional policy, the theory and measurement of regional disparities, the territorial aspects of human capital and innovation.