Among the many graduates from the faculty of law are the former Presidents of Portugal Jorge Sampaio and Mário Soares, Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano, the President of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso, Portuguese statesman, deputy, and professor Adriano Moreira and businessman and former Prime Minister Francisco Pinto Balsemão.

Television pundit and geopolitics expert Nuno Rogeiro and the writer and university professor Jaime Nogueira Pinto also studied there.

Nuno Crato, a Portuguese university professor, researcher, mathematician, economist, and writer who has been appointed president of both the Portuguese Mathematical Society and Taguspark, studied for a while at the Faculdade de Ciências before changing his mind and graduate at the ISEG - Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão/Technical University of Lisbon, embracing a notable academic career.

Lidia Salgueiro taught physics and conducted research for over 30 years, becoming the first woman to be elected as a Corresponding Member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, an organization founded in 1779.

The Faculty of Medicine is a leading medical school, having its origins in the 19th century when the Real Escola Médico-Cirúrgica de Lisboa was founded in the city.

António Damásio and Alexandre Carlos Caldas studied at this faculty, and Egas Moniz (a Nobel Prize winner) was a professor there.

The Faculty of Letters remained installed on the facilities of the Superior Studies, an annex to the Academy of Science, until 1957, when it changed to the current building, in the University City (Cidade Universitária).

In 1975, a new pavilion was built to accommodate the large influx of students who arrived after the democratization of higher education in Portugal, a consequence of the Carnation Revolution.

Notable professors at the faculty include the second President of the Portuguese Republic, Teófilo Braga, and writers Vitorino Nemésio and Urbano Tavares Rodrigues.

The Instituto Geofisico do Infante Dom Luiz exists since 1853 and is a research and operational unit that maintains the longest meteorological series of Portugal.

The Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), an associated state laboratory, is a university institution devoted to research and advanced training in the social sciences.

The ICS focuses its research on five main subject areas: the formation of the contemporary world; the study of citizenship and democratic institutions; the problems of sustainability, linking the environment, risk and space; social changes and individual action in the context of the family, lifestyles and schooling; and issues concerning identity, migration and religion.

The central activities of the ICS include: publishing research in book form and in articles in Portuguese and international journals of reference; advanced education to the level of master's degrees and doctorates; maintaining a dialogue with the international scientific community; and spreading knowledge in the wider community—an increasingly important activity to ensure the necessary interaction between science and citizenship.