Ana Vasconcelos Martins
Ana Vasconcelos Martins is a Portuguese jurist, political scientist and politician of the Liberal Initiative who was elected member of the European Parliament in 2024.
Biography
Personal life
Martins was born on Terceira Island in 1985, has lived in Lisbon since the age of 7 and now divides her life between Lisbon and Brussels.
Academia
She studied law and political science at the Catholic University of Portugal and was a research assistant and publications manager at UCP's Institute for Political Studies.University of Oxford
At the University of Oxford she read for the degree in Political Theory at St Anthony's College, with a particular interest in democratic checks on political power in the Digital Age. As a research associate of the Dahrendorf Programme at Oxford, she contributed to the Europe's Stories Project whose podcast she also managed and co-hosted. She was a Europaeum Scholar, researching perceptions of democratic participation and belonging in the European Union.
Politics
Entry into Politics
She was the lead candidate of Liberal Initiative, as an independent, for the Azores constituency in the 2019 legislative election. After joining the party, Martins served as a vice president of IL between 2023 and 2025 on the team of Rui Rocha. During this period she headed the party's Policy Research unit, the ILab.
European Parliament
For the 2019 European Parliament election, she was an independent candidate in fourth place on the party's list. In 2024 she was elected a member of the European Parliament for IL as the second name in a list headed by the party's former leader João Cotrim Figueiredo. As her party is a full member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, she caucuses with the Renew Europe parliamentary group.EP Committees and Delegations
Martins is a full member of the standing Committee on the Environment, Climate and Food Safety as well as a member of the Delegation to the EU-Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee and the Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly. Martins is also a member of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology and is a substitute member of the standing Committee on Transport and Tourism.