Carnegie Mellon University yesterday announced a partnership with Portugal and some of that country's largest companies to educate and provide research in collaboration with a dozen Portuguese universities.

A group of top CMU administrators, including President Jared Cohon, were with various representatives from the Portuguese government and companies in Aveiro to sign a five-year agreement to establish the Information and Communication Technologies Institute. CMU will receive $42.6 million from the Portuguese government as part of the agreement.

The CMU agreement comes on the heels of similar partnerships between the Portuguese government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas.

The CMU program will play to the college's strengths in information technology and innovation management to help train the next generation of students to work in high technology businesses in Portugal and other countries, said Dr. Pradeep Khosla, dean of CMU's College of Engineering.

"They have recognized Carnegie Mellon as the leader in [these areas] in this country and they're working with the best of the best," he said from Portugal.

The new educational portion of the program will begin next fall and offer master's and doctorate degrees. The program will be open to students worldwide.

Doctoral students will study at CMU's Oakland campus for two years and at a Portugese university for two years and receive doctorates from both.

The Portuguese partnership is "a significant piece" of CMU's strategy to become a global university, Dr. Cohon said from Portugal. The college also has programs in a number of other countries, including Australia, Greece, India, Japan and Qatar.

The Portuguese government reached out to CMU and other American colleges to extend opportunities to its students and react to changes in the global economy, said Jose Mariano Gago, Portugal's minister of science, technology and higher education.

"We feel that internationalization of our higher education system is important for the development of our country. Our scientific community is quite young."

While Portugal is not experiencing a brain drain, the government wants to prepare the country and its economy for the future, Mr. Gago said.